Reading “Power and Privilege”, an anthropological research paper by Michelle Camacho, has allowed me the opportunity to analyze and reflect upon my own service learning experience as a tour guide in Costa Rica this past summer. In her paper, Camacho explores power relations between mainly white, middle-upper class students, to those of Mexican migrant workers in various service-learning contexts that are meant to accompany her class on U.S.-Mexico border relations.

This paper, although much more academic in its format than other I’ve read previously, centers on some topics that I researched rather extensively before accepting my job position with Rustic Pathways; those of privilege and travel volunteerism, also known as voluntourism. Rustic Pathways is a multinational teen tour company with operations in over 19 different countries on 5 different continents. Over 75% of their travel programs are advertised as largely “community serviced based”, while many other action adventure and language-immersion based programs also include a certain amount of community service hours as well.

The service learning contexts that Camacho’s college students engaged in are quite distinct from the types of volunteering opportunities presented by Rustic Pathways and the myriad other teen tour companies that exist today. First of all, the service learning experience in “Power and Privilege” were entirely motivated by, and served as an accompaniment to, an academic classroom setting. Rustic Pathway’s volunteer programs, along with the majority of other volunteer programs run by similar companies, differ fundamentally in their approaches to, and very definitions of, service learning. On the contrary, the service learning I performed this summer was with high school age students whose parents paid an exorbitant price for their students to partake in some sort of travel excursion to Costa Rica, where the service component was not always the main focus of the trip.

The trip I helped lead for 6 weeks was titled “Sarapiqui Tropical Rainforest Service Adventure”. This program ran for six, one-week sessions throughout the summer. For the summer of 2014, the community service project that we were tackling was one of the most expansive that Rustic Pathways had ever taken on. We were tasked with transforming a rather fruitless monoculture garden of plantain trees, into an poyculture garden center outfitted with an array of recycled and cheap materials to construct a circular mandala garden, a composting cabin, and a large bamboo green house that would serve to benefit the women of the small town of San Ramon de Sarapiquí. The end goal behind this project was to give the women of this rural farm town the knowledge, access, and the skill set to practice small-scale sustainable farming practices. The concept for this service learning project was one of the most exhilarating projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. To this day, I still get excited thinking about what it will be look like fully finished.

That being said, the planning and execution of actually carrying out productive service learning was hindered by a couple of key factors. First off, the logistical design of the program was sometimes counterproductive to student’s full engagement in productive service. Because we would receive a new group of students every week, it was sometimes difficult for students to see the fruits of their labor payoff in tangible or visual ways. Many times they couldn’t wrap their heads around how what they were doing would actually play into the bigger picture, and this sometimes hindered their motivation. The second deterrent to productive service, which I believe was actually the biggest problem, were the weather conditions we were faced with. We were in Costa Rica during peak rainy season, in the heart of the central lowlands, where it rained for about 20 hours a day. Although we were instructed by our program head, a top employee of Rustic Pathways, to continue working rain or shine, what actually happened was quite a different story.

Our program head was rarely ever on site with us because he ran eight different programs. So, on the project site were two local maestros de obra, or head construction workers who provided the oversight for the entire project. They were the ones responsible for the entire blueprint and layout of the project, as well as telling us where they needed volunteers. What would usually happen was we’d show up to start work at about nine o’clock in the morning, and then by ten, it’d be pouring. Although myself and the other counselors were usually up for working through the rain, and would have been more than willing to convince the kids to do so as well, the Maestros de obra would go running for cover and hide inside of a shed anytime it started to rain, which was about seventy percent of the time. So in actuality, what we would end up doing was we would all crowd into a small shed and play music and eat snacks. We would do this sometimes for hours on end, foregoing the possibility of doing anything productive, with hopes for the rain to pass.

Another aspect I found quite disheartening on the program was the lack of cultural integration. Staying in an eco-lodge with many other teen travel groups, we really fit the bill for the cliché of the large groups of Americans who come to Costa Rica for the zip lining, wildlife, white water rafting, and many other natural wonders with very limited interaction with actual community members. I believe the language barrier between students and the maestros de obra also perpetuated this aspect.

Thinking back on my summer with Rustic Pathways, I cannot help but take the side of blogger Pipa Briddle, who in her highly contentious blog post titled “The Problem with Little White Girls and Boys: Why I stopped being a Voluntourist”, really debunks the entire Voluntourism industry quite articulately. I believe that the majority of the travel packages advertised as volunteer programs to teens by these giant corporations, are really only advertised as so in order to persuade parents to send their kids on such outrageously priced programs. That is not to say that these firms are operating with the same unethical disregard for community and the environment that many other large-scale corporations do, but well thought-out community service engagement does not seem to be the center point of their overall mission.

Although service learning can provide students with life changing out of class learning experiences, for the majority of them, it does not fundamentally or radically alter their way of thinking or perspective about the inferiority or privilege context. In fact, many of them, as well as the counselors instructing them are completely naïve to such concepts, and it is in the best interest of the company that it stays this way, so as not to deter parents from signing their kids up for such programs or dissuading qualified employees from applying. I have no doubt that service-learning can benefit both the students who serve, as well as the community members whom the service aims to benefit, but only when there is a greater level of reciprocity among both parties, and a stronger overall commitment to the service aspect. I think the communities Rustic Pathways aim to improve would benefit much more productively taking the money they receive from parents, and putting it toward employing locals with professional skill sets to carry out the large-scale community service projects they try to tackle, instead of having large groups of high school students with zero construction experience trying to tackle daunting and sometimes dangerous projects such as the one we worked on this summer. I’m sure that had they employed professionals, Rustic Pathways could have finished the entire project by summer’s end, instead of having to prolong the construction of the project for an entire year until next summer. This would have been more beneficial to the community by far.