What changed in these two visits to radically alter my perspective? I returned in 2015 full of motivation. I did not book a return flight. I wanted to stay for a very long time - at least six months. I felt there was no better place for me to be than volunteering with Dream Africa. Olivia and I returned near the same time and brought with us as much for the kids as our luggage restrictions allowed us. I decided to buy a laptop online and a lot of educational software to go with it. The kids loved laptops and I thought it to be a very effective way for them to learn. We also brought statonery and focused on bringing small things with a lot of utility.
We spent a lot of money whilst we were there that summer. Neither of us like to say no, especially when it is children in need. Shoes, school fees, health insurance, trips out, electricity money, new lightbulbs, medicine, new fans, new books, hospital visits, and taxis...so many taxis. Elin, the only other experienced volunteer, was unwell so the burden usually fell to us. At some point, the staff in the orphanage started expecting us to pay for things rather than asking. "Oh our fridge is broken, the repairman is here, you need to pay him". We made it clear that the requests were getting unreasonable: that we were not giving them money from the organisation; this was extra money out of our pockets and it was getting too much. The requests lessened, but it was nevertheless an extremely expensive trip and one that was unsustainable in the long-term.
Taking on more administration work also changed my perspective on volunteering. As mentioned, Elin was an important volunteer for Dream Africa and she was unwell. She took on the bulk of the organisational and logistical work. Basically, she did all of the work that wasn't fun. Helping her out, was an eye-opener to the barriers she faced. Many frustrating hours were spent with Social Welfare trying to create a license for the orphanage. The name of the orphanage had to be changed multiple times, new documents with information about the children were now needed, previous documents that took painstaking hours to create were no longer needed. At times the guidelines were completely contradictory. Deadlines changed. Communication from Social Welfare was also inconsistent and meetings were missed.
Aside from the paperwork, getting things done was always a struggle. Registering the children for health insurance often meant a four hour queue and the children all had to be brought along in person. Most frustrating of all, Grandma (who was in charge of the orphanage) frequently lost the health insurance cards and they had to be replaced. Furthermore, hospital trips that summer were a nightmare. There was a nationwide doctors' strike and all the nearby hospitals were closed. Instead, we had to take children two bus-rides away to a military hospital that was completely overrun. It was often an all-day activity to have the children seen and to receive their medication.
All of this made me realise how little I understood about working for an NGO when I was there last year. I was oblivious to the difficult, frustrating work involved behind the scenes and the difficult decisions about allocating money. It also made me see how ineffective and misguided most volunteers tended to be. When volunteers decided to organise a 'pizza party' for the kids in the orphanage, it upset me just how short-sighted they were being. These children needed bags of rice - they needed cheap food, not to be stuffed full of pizza for one day and then be starving come November when all the volunteers and all the money is gone. But what fun is there in buying rice? You don't get to see the kids having fun. You don't get the happy selfies. You don't get the same gratification. I became increasingly aware that most volunteers cared more about feeling good about themselves than doing what was best for the children they had come so far to help. And I saw myself in them and I hated it.
What drove me crazy more than anything else was the preoccupation with pictures. So many photos. "Take a picture of me holding this child", "sing this song to the camera", "do that dance again so I can film it". It's natural to want to take photos when you're having fun but during hours when they should be teaching I just felt like screaming at them "children are not a tourist attraction". Worst were the self- righteous Facebook/Instagram posts that followed, patting themselves on the back for the work they had done. The people that made these posts also tended to be the ones that didn't even teach the children or provide any sort of sustainable benefit to these kids they claimed to have helped. Again, I saw a bit of me last year in them and hated myself for it.
The saddest thing is that these volunteers are usually lovely, kind people who genuinely cared and showed love to these children: they were just misguided in their approach. That is my biggest criticism of Dream Africa. It puts too much emphasis on providing a good time for volunteers and not enough on guiding them into being effective volunteers. Without intelligent guidelines and training, it is inevitable for volunteers to be misguided and incompetent. Their potential is never realised.
Nevertheless, this sense of disillusionment paled in comparison to the sense of crushing despair that was to follow with the news of the orphanage closing.
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