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Pt. 1: What is the 'White Savior Complex'?
When I applied for Peace Corps two years ago, I was a bright-eyed idealist who wanted to ‘help people in need’ while gaining health-related experience to carry me through a few years before going to medical school. Preferably abroad, because I wanted to deeply understand a new culture.
What I have found myself deeply caught in, now, in early 2019, is the political, cultural, and socio-economic reverberations of the ‘white savior complex’, which I unwittingly contribute to as a Peace Corps Volunteer. No matter what my position is or what work I do, my mere presence as a white volunteer in Cambodia furthers this.
As I learn more about white saviorism, I feel compelled to share the knowledge I have accumulated and how it connects with my, and many others’, experiences. I have also put off writing more blog posts until now because of reasons that hopefully will become clear soon.
This is a complex topic, and I want to take the proper space and time to explain it, so I will be posting a few blog posts in a series. For many, this topic will make you uncomfortable – especially those who have participated in service trips abroad or have had other similar experiences. Try to embrace that feeling and read with an open mind, because this is the deeper truth that we often do not get to witness ourselves.
This is part one.
So, what is the ‘white savior complex’ anyways?
It is connected to concepts you may have already heard of, such as ‘voluntourism’and ‘colonialism’and ‘privilege’.
White saviorism is the idea that westerners (mainly white, but not always) believe that they are needed to provide aid and ‘save’ people in low-income countries - especially in Africa, but also extending to Latin America and Asia as well. The graphic by No White Saviors on the right explains this clearly.
At its best, the white savior complex perpetuates the stereotype of the altruistic western ‘savior’ while reaffirming that the helpless, pitiful people they are trying to benefit cannot ‘save’ themselves and need help from wealthier western countries.
At its worst, white saviorism is destructive. Harmful. Even fatal.
Nobody intends to cause harm. Their intentions are good. However, their actions are rooted in a sense of benefit to the savior with little regard to deeper, long-term consequence to the receiving population.
Let’s look at some examples that will help further illustrate this – cases, both theoretical and real, ranging from mild to extreme.
Often, ‘white saviorism’ manifests in the now-popular voluntourism, which involves a short-term vacation, generally a week to a month or two, combining both volunteering and sightseeing in a low-income country. Volunteers pay good money to spend time playing with children in orphanages, build a school, or teach English, and then spend the rest of their vacation touring the country. Sounds like a good way to give back to the country you’re visiting, right?
Well, not exactly.
Let’s start with a very common voluntourism activity - visiting orphanages. Voluntourists generally will either go for the day to meet and play with the kids, give out gifts, and tour the facility, or stay longer to volunteer in various capacities. It sounds harmless, but if you investigate deeper, the orphanage industry actually turns out to be created almost solely by foreigner demand. Foreigners donate money to these orphanages, and orphanages therefore stay open. Local families will then drop their children off there because the orphanages often have more resources for their children than the families can provide themselves. Alternatively, and more insidiously, there have been cases in Cambodia (and in other countries as well) of kidnapping children to be placed in orphanages. Also common is cases in which orphanage workers offer poor mothers large sums of money for their small children, and in return, leave promises that the mother will be able to visit – yet she is often never allowed to and then never sees her child again.
Foreigner attention and funding therefore encourages a cycle of family separation instead of creating opportunities for the family and community’s educational and economic development. Children are forcibly separated from their families so that they can be a tourist attraction for westerners. Throughout their childhood, they are outwardly placated by small gifts from foreigners of toys and stickers but become psychologically damaged from lack of familial attachment. It has been noted that, especially that foreigners who come stay and volunteer longer-term, the children form a bond with the teens and adults who show them affection and love in place of a permanent parent figure. However, it is inevitable that the visitor must go home, leaving in their wake a cute Facebook profile photo and memory for the visitor, and another in a long series of heartbreaks and long-term emotional trauma for the child. That is the privilegeof the volunteer – they don’t need to think about the effects of their actions because it does not inconvenience, or even really affect their own life, in any negative way.
Paris Hilton visiting an orphanage in Bali. Don't be like her.
Read more here about the effects of volunteering at orphanages.
Let’s move on to another voluntourism example - building structures. During my senior year at Tulane University, I organized and led our chapter of Global Brigades on a short-term volunteer trip to Nicaragua to help staff pop-up medical clinics, build hygiene infrastructure, and educate patients. We also spent a day digging pathways to lay down water infrastructure alongside local workers. We fundraised and paid each around $2000 (including flights) to participate on this 9-day trip. The money went towards funding the short-term clinics, medicines, construction materials, and hiring local workers, but also went towards our room and board at a local hostel and in-country travel.
Global Brigades does great work – they are all about sustainable, local development with the ultimate aim being no longer needed and moving out of a community or country (unfortunately, a rare goal in the international development world). They train local workers and help to establish community organizations, they use in-country doctors and health professionals, hire local construction workers and masons, etc. However, given all of this, I now do not understand why we, a group of 25 college students who mostly have done little to no physical labor in our lives, were helping with construction projects.
Our main public health project outside of the clinics was a combined toilet/shower/water basin structure and a septic tank. We split into three groups and worked at a three different families’ homes to improve their hygiene capabilities through construction options they have selected and contributed money to. It took us about three days to complete the work. With local construction workers, it probably could have been completed in one to two days with much higher quality. We clearly did not know what we were doing and had to be supervised and instructed heavily by the local masons. After we finished up the work (the local masons would go in after it was dry to install plumbing and other fixtures), we ‘educated’ the receiving families in a very awkward 15-minute talk about the importance of hand-washing and proper hygiene.
Constructing the latrine/shower structure.
Some of our group with the family and the completed shell of the structure.
At the end, the village held us a ceremony of thanks where we all collectively felt rather uncomfortable. Back then, I couldn’t pin down exactly why I felt that way, but now I understand why. They were celebrating us – our presence, our help. But it seemed to us that the local workers – the health educators, doctors, construction workers – were far more capable and completed far more important and higher quality work than we did. So why were we being celebrated and not them?
Even though Global Brigades has all the ingredients in place to be an impactful, sustainable organization, it still insists on bringing volunteers in which not only furthers their sense of white savior complex but also confirms the receiving Nicaraguan community that we are needed there in order to make all of it happen (evidenced by the ceremony they put together for us). The thing is, they really didn’t need us to be there at all – local workers could do it all without our physical presence. The biggest contribution we made was our money.
I want to offer another example of volunteer construction work but in a slightly different vein. Also during my senior year of college, the intra-college sorority association was raising money to go on a trip to build a school in Malawi during my senior year. OK, sounds great. But let’s pause for a moment and examine this.
In America, would you let a group of unskilled women, who likely have never had construction experience in their life, build a school for you? Chances are, no. You would hire a local construction crew and an experienced engineer. So why would you not do the same in Malawi? Why should we have different standards for the US and Africa? Both American and Malawian children deserve a high-quality school building. The money that these women raised for their trip would be far better spent donated to the construction project, where it can enter the local economy by hiring local labor to construct the school building.
Construction work is often touted as a great way to make an tangible, long-lasting impact. It can be, given a community-established need and sense of local responsibility. However, as I have seen in Cambodia, this is often neglected as the excitement of building a new bathroom or hand-washing station takes over the actual priorities of the community. Traveling cross-country and even in my own community, I have seen countless randomly placed and abandoned bathrooms. I’m positive that they were build with the best of intentions, but it seems like nobody asked the community to contribute, or even if they wanted it or if that was the best location to put it. The money was spent (probably foreign money), the construction was done, and now those bathrooms sit in the middle of fields, on school grounds, on the side of the road – forlorn, neglected, and unused.
Read more here about a voluntourist’s experience building a school in a ‘third-world’ country.
At this point, perhaps you aren’t so into the voluntourist scene. But how can you still see the world without spending so much money? Many turn to teaching English abroad. It’s a popular option for those who want to travel and stay in one place for a longer amount of time. English teachers are in demand all over the world…however, many employers or organizations abroad don’t require teaching experience or certification as they just want a native speaker. A teacher and linguistics specialist friend once told me that “native speakers are often the worst teachers”. From my personal experience attempting to teach English in to my neighborhood kids in my Cambodian village without any formal training, this is true.
The lack of experience and training of the teacher is often compounded by low awareness of the children's prior language learning experience, lack of ability to speak the local language to explain critical concepts and translate, and little time to learn how to work within the culture and current education system. And, consider this - have you ever benefitted significantly from working with a new teacher for only two weeks? A month? Even three months?
Past English-teacher volunteers at a local NGO have complained to me that, while they come for three months - considered to be on the longer side for the voluntourism industry - almost the entire period of time had been spent trying to pick up some of the language, figure out how to teach, and understand the culture.The volunteers definitely did not feel like they had been able to transfer much, if any, English knowledge or speaking ability to their students. And then, after those three months, they leave and the next volunteer comes to start all over again. So when, exactly, within the cycle of volunteer teachers coming and going, will these children get a chance at quality English education? Yet…the western volunteers still are shown off by the organization and admired by friends and family. They are touted as ‘saving the world’ – an adventurous, altruistic, kind-heartedsavior. The volunteers receive lots of praise for their work - but what did they really do? Did they serve anyone but themselves, their image, or their resume?
It is imperative to hold teachers abroad to the same standards that we do in the US – teaching experience, a degree, long-term work contracts – if we hope to actually ‘make a difference’ in reality rather than on paper, or on social media.
I want to examine a final case – one that exemplifies the absolute worst case scenario in white saviorism and examines a theme I have been angling towards, namely, the justification of sending unskilled volunteers to do highly skilled work because it’s a ‘third world country’.
Renee Bach, who was an 18-year-old missionary at the time, started the Christian NGO Serving His Children in Jinja, Uganda in 2010. The organization, according to its website, is “breaking the cycle of malnutrition” through medical treatment, education, and the bible (yes, really). In spite of building up a team of trained Ugandan health staff, Bach often treated the patients, who were generally transferred from hospitals and medical centers, herself – with no medical training whatsoever. She often spoke publicly about loving being able to do “hands-on medical care” and blogged about how she taught herself many medical procedures from Youtube. Essentially, she was learning medicine through practicing on live children. It is not so surprising then to find out an unknown number of children died in her care at the SHC health center (unknown, because the organization did not take proper protocol following death - the number of children who died at the hands of her human experimentation could not be accurately counted) The health center was shut down in 2015 and an investigation is ongoing.
Bach completing a medical procedure on a child. Photo from No White Saviors.
As a hopeful doctor, before I read about the deaths under Bach’s care, my first impulse upon hearing about her home-grown medical practice was to exclaim ‘how heroic!’ Why is it that my instinctive reaction is to admire a women who, if operating in the US, would be locked up in jail for illegal experimentation on humans and impersonating a doctor?
It is because her story fits the prevailing narrative in our society that those who go abroad to help are automatically ‘saviors’, regardless of the quality of their work or their impact.
Read more here about the Serving His Children case.
Because of the single-story narrative of ‘poor, war-torn Africa’ and other low-income countries shown in literature, media, film, and advertising, we are trained to think that we are the savior and we alone hold the solution – when, in reality, we often do more harm than good. In fact, Western colonialism was (and is) the largest contributing factor to Africa’s wars and poverty as foreign powers laid claim and drained their natural resources while planting the seeds of conflict, some of which continue to carry on today. We started it, and we continue to perpetuate it.
The white savior complex convinces us that those in low-income countries must be ‘saved’ by us. It erases the complexities of their cultures and countries; persuades us that if we go visit, it must be to help poor, desperate people rather than to enjoy the country for its cultural and natural bounties. By nature of western society, this learned instinct resides in almost all of us and will remain unless we consciously choose to acknowledge and fight it.
Examine this closely.
Must-watch video:
Next post in the series: The Contradictions of Peace Corps as an Organization