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subscribeMonday, July 30, 2007
Voluntourism
The Brave New Traveler blog has a post about volunteer tourism, providing a kind of how-to resource for those looking to do some philanthropic adventure traveling. Of course, this seems to focus on tourism in the more conventional sense, i.e. travel to more remote or distant locations (relative to where one is coming from), but it's also becoming a practice closer to home. Many people in the US traveled to New Orleans to spend some time rebuilding homes and businesses, for example, taking what the Washington Post called "working vacations."
While this is definitely an interesting way of repositioning the positive potential of travel and tourism, the new voluntourism is essentially a descendant of missionary work. Not to say that all missionary work is negative and necessarily proselytizing, but it certainly comes with historical baggage.
PBS recently featured a piece on voluntourism in Tanzania, and has a short list of related resources.
posted by ryan griffis # 1:14 PM 
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