free palestine.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

I've been on mission trips, both domestic and international. I once believed I was doing good work. I don't any more, and I'm going to walk you through why. We're going to set aside the religious aspect for a second and call it what it is: voluntourism. You're going somewhere novel to you and doing volunteer work. That's voluntourism.

Here's what I learned over the 21 years since my first international mission trip. Voluntourism is a destabilizing influence on the people and communities it nominally serves. They introduce a lot of change in a short period of time and then they leave without doing any of the work needed to make those changes sustainable. The people who live there are faced with a no-win choice: they can try to keep the change going, and devote resources they may not have to creating the necessary infrastructure; they can abandon that change and let it decay over time, with all the risks associated; or they can scrap it for parts and risk upsetting anyone from the original set of voluntourists if they ever come back.

Now imagine that there are kids involved, as they often are. Voluntourists have a nasty habit of using kids as props to enhance the social credibility of their photos. I did this, and I'm ashamed of it. Kids everywhere form emotional bonds easily. So what happens to a kid whose school is constantly bringing in volunteers for a week or two who are friendly and affectionate, who bring food or gifts, and then bounce and never come back? That kid eventually grows numb. They don't connect with people as easily. They stop trusting that people have good intentions.

And all this is without even addressing the objectification of people in poverty that goes into these trips. The devaluation of cultures. The implicit, and sometimes explicit paternalism and colonialism that fuels them. Voluntourism depends on the idea that you are coming from somewhere "better" to somewhere "worse" and that your presence and cultural exports will inherently improve the place you are going.