Leading up to my junior year of college, I spent months trying to figure out whether or not I wanted to do a study abroad for an entire semester or just the summer. I made countless pros and cons lists, balancing considerations such as finances, whether or not I wanted to take classes or work, and what it would mean to me to miss an entire semester in Ann Arbor. I cried to my parents, friends, and academic advisor (bless his soul for dealing with my neurotic emails and pages of spreadsheets) begging them to help me weigh my options and make the decision. So many thoughts, questions, and concerns were swirling around in my head that the decision would keep me up at night. 

 

I can’t quite remember when I made the exact decision to go over the summer, but I do remember the reason. Why would I miss an entire semester of school to travel abroad when I could do it over the summer, when I had nothing else going on? The chances that I’d be making money were slim, but studying abroad would mean sacrificing my two current campus jobs to spend way more money than I was currently spending to travel around. Plus, I decided that I would rather work somewhere as opposed to studying abroad. I felt as though going in and actually engaging with an organization that was tackling a specific issue would be a better way to get a hands-on working and learning experience. 

 

My parents were a bit hesitant when I told them that I wanted to spend my summer in South Africa. Although neither of them had ever been, the thought of me spending two months in a not-so-Westernized part of the world made them nervous. Despite doing little research, they made it clear that I could have picked somewhere safer and more comfortable. They encouraged me to look at other places like Prague or Australia.

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Once I decided that I’d be spending my summer abroad, I spent weeks having phone calls with different study and intern abroad programs. I looked at some through my university, but mostly at outside organizations so that I could meet people from across the country and around the world. After weeks of phone calls and email exchanges, I found the program that I thought was the best for me, let’s call it Volunteer Hub. With Volunteer Hub, which was located in Cape Town, I was to fill out an extensive survey with questions gauging what fields and type of work I was interested in so that they could place me in one of their partner organizations. They asked questions such as what I’m looking for in an ideal internship, what I would specifically like to learn more about, and what my greatest strengths and/or the skills I had that would, “benefit my internship site producing a tangible result for the organization.” I eagerly filled out the survey and emphasized my interest in social justice and community action. 

 

Around a week later, I received my job placement, a home for girls who had been sexually abused. I would be creating after-school programs for the girls based on topics that the organization needed. The organization seemed perfect for me: I love working with kids and am passionate about women’s rights. The pairing checked out, and I replied almost immediately telling them that I was ready to officially hop on board. 

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In the weeks following, I got numerous texts, emails, and messages from family members who were congratulating me, raising concerns about my travels, and inquiring about the contents of my trip. After reading the chains of texts and emails between my family members and myself, there was one word that kept popping up and would later haunt my thoughts: privilege. Being commended for working with girls who are less privileged than I am, that they were so proud that I would be serving underprivileged communities, those types of messages. My grandma, my aunts and uncles, and my parents were all praising me for doing such incredible, selfless work in my free time. When was I leaving? Would I be doing other traveling in Africa? What kind of food do they have there?

Growing up in an upper-middle class family while attending one of the top universities in the world, I would consider myself as a person who is relatively privileged in the grand scheme of life. Recently, though, I’ve grappled with how to use the word privilege in my classes, at work, and socially. What does being privileged even mean? My being able to travel to South Africa already constitutes a notion of privilege, that I’m able to afford, through a combination of my own income, scholarships, and familial support, to even physically get to Cape Town in the first place. Am I more privileged than the girls that I was to be working with because they would not have these same opportunities? I’m not quite confident enough in my answer to these questions, so I decided to do some research on the philosophical meaning of privilege and how it has been studied in the past, hoping that it could help bring some clarity into my discomfort. Sociologist Peter Singer argues in his Contemporary Ethics that a being’s interests should always be weighed according to that being’s concrete properties, not according to its belonging to some abstract group. So, for example, we would privilege a starving person’s interest in food over the same interest as someone who is only slightly hungry.

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From what I’ve gathered from this, this means that we can define those who are less fortunate are those whose needs should be weighed more than the majority of the population. 

 

I don’t think that it is right for me to resist the idea that I am privileged, but why? How come I seemed to believe that my needs were not as important as the needs of the girls at the home? Why did my I, along with my family, automatically assume that I was a good person for helping the “less fortunate” with no questions asked? I’m not saying that I don’t think that this isn’t true, but I’m also skeptical of the idea that it automatically and inherently is. The girls at the home seemed to need the female empowerment workshops that I taught because they weren't given any in their day-to-day lives. I was. Because I had the privilege and the resources to do so. Female empowerment to me, though, looks completely different from what female empowerment means to them because our lives are so incredibly different. Coming in and targeting the girls as underprivileged because of this, and further pushing my privilege onto them could maybe have been helpful, but it most likely wasn’t. Who's to say besides them?

 

I still don't have a clear understanding of whether or not my family was right to say that I was doing an amazing thing working with this "underprivileged" population. Do I disagree with me being privileged? No, but my privilege wasn't the primary vector as to why I decided to work with these girls in South Africa. I could walk outside my house in the Metro Detroit area and find people with similar issues. But I didn’t, because I’m privileged by the social identity that enables me to pick and choose who and where I want to help, in this case, it being those who are least like myself. It’s important to recognize that my desire to help others was not the only factor that came into play. I wanted to travel, to experience a country and a lifestyle completely different from my Metro Detroit/Ann Arbor upbringing. If I wanted to act purely on my desire to help others, I could have stepped outside and simply donated to an organization in my area that worked with at-risk or damaged youth and kept the working to the professionals. But I didn’t, because I didn’t have to. 

 

Although it’s been hard for me to perfectly pinpoint my motivations for what I wanted to do, I knew that they did not align exactly with how my family had discussed them. Thinking about my privilege and how it relates to the privilege of the girls at my site has created this tension between what I thought I was doing and what I was actually doing, and why I had even decided to do it in the first place. When I decided that I wanted to go to South Africa, it wasn’t solely because I wanted to help those less fortunate than I am. I wanted to travel somewhere completely different from where I grew up and where I felt comfortable. A part of my decision, though, was related to the notion that I would supposedly be helping serve a population that could benefit from my presence. This misalignment still sits strangely with me, but I think that it’s worth it to address it head-on to learn more about myself and the world around me.