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Condé Nast Traveler

Guilt-Free Tripping

May 2008

You don’t have to wear a shirt to do good. Brook Wilkinson goes luxe in Southeast Asia and figures out how to give back, too

“You took the helicopter ride around the temples of Angkor Wat? How much does that cost?” the monk asked, his eyes showing an incomprehension that his shaved eyebrows could not. Appearing daily in his saffron robes, he was a standout student in the advanced English class that I was helping to teach. “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” I replied, staring ashamedly at the wooden desk in front of me. Over the course of my thirty-minute joyride, I realized I’d doled out more than many Cambodians earn in a year.

I had come to Cambodia on a luxury volunteer vacation arranged through Journeys Within, a tour operator run by an American couple based in Siem Reap. I’d be spending about half of my time – as most visitors to Cambodia do – exploring Phnom Penh and the cultural relics of Angkor Wat, staying at high-end hotels and touring with private guides. On the other days, I’d be volunteering with the tour operator’s nonprofit Journeys Within Our Community (JWOC). At best, I hoped to alleviate some of the guilt that comes with being a moneyed traveler in the developing world.

Almost every tourist I met in Cambodia expressed a desire to help the country’s people, who suffered so much in the 1970s and 1980s: U.S. bombing runs, a coup d’état, the Khmer Rouge genocide, and Vietnamese occupation. Tourism is now big business in the stabilized country, and improving the quality of life is at least a declared goal for many tourist enterprises. But when I spent $10 at a restaurant that employs street kids and $250 on a helicopter ride piloted by an Austrian expat, I wondered where most of my money was going.

When it came time to volunteer, the benefits were clear. JWOC has awarded scholarships to thirty Cambodian university students who, in return, work five to ten hours a week on one of JWOC’s other initiatives – providing micro-loans to small businesses, building wells, and teaching free English classes. This division of labor is one of the most compelling aspects for JWOC: for the most part, the Cambodians are in charge. As Managing Director Jesse Wolfe told me, “Ultimately we hope to run ourselves out of business.”

I had been skeptical about teaching English; critics argue that short-term volunteers often do more to disrupt a class than to benefit it. JWOC’s courses are all taught by English-speaking students, with volunteers assisting whenever possible. I arrived with no teaching experience. In the beginner class, I stumbled over grammar rules and failed to engage kids. But in the advanced classes, the students seemed to benefit from conversing with a native speaker. The teacher guided me through one lesson on past-tense verbs. As he wrote rules on the board, I spoke them: “Play-d. Talk-t. Need-ed.” If I could help these kids enunciate the final syllables, they would be better equipped to get a job in business or tourism.

In contrast to other volunteer vacation programs, JWOC assigns each volunteer based on professional expertise. One volunteer, a former pharmaceutical executive with a brain for numbers and organization, was put in charge of streamlining the micro-loan program’s books; a volunteer who worked at Visa developed a curriculum that the scholarship students teach loan recipients to help them create business plans; I, meanwhile, was assigned to write two articles for the newsletter to donors. With this system, no time is wasted training volunteers, and JWOC benefits from know-how that it would otherwise have to pay for.

The guilt that I often feel as a traveler in the developing world had little chance to gain traction in Cambodia. My reticence to give money to beggars (I was once scammed by a girl in India) might have lost out to the land mine victims looking for handouts near Siem Reap. But while it was painful to walk by, each time I mentally added another dollar to the check I’d written to JWOC. Harder to justify was the traipsing around Angkor Wat: few sections were roped off, and my guide insisted that we could walk along the weathered stones. The director of Heritage Watch, an NGO trying to conserve cultural artifacts, agreed that unrestricted access is bad but argued that the larger challenge for Cambodia is the brevity of most trips: Tourists typically spend a day or two at Angkor Wat and then move on to Thailand or Vietnam. Journeys Within keeps guests in Cambodia longer, through volunteer work and tours like a kayak trip from a village on Tonle Sap Lake.

I left Cambodia without the weight of the world’s problems on my shoulders. For once I stayed at a first-class hotel in the developing world and didn’t feel some shame at my good fortune. As Journeys Within president Brandon Ross put it, “You may not be able to change the world, but you can change lives.” Just as important was the faith my visit gave me in JWOC. The ideal voluntourism program aims to both make use of travelers’ time and earn their future support. After watching the staff – Americans and Cambodians – work so diligently, I knew that whatever money I could give them would be well spent.