Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jcampbell1

I took a trip to Africa to go on a Safari and climb Kilimanjaro. I was amazed at how many do gooder tourists there are.

The conversations go like:

Me: What are you here to do?

Them: Build a school.

Me: Oh, you are a carpenter.

Them: No, part of a school program.

Me: Oh, you are providing unskilled construction labor. Didn't realize Tanzania had a shortage.

Near the end of the trip, I met a friend's cousin, asked what she was doing, and she was going from village to village verifying that chlorination systems in NGO built wells were working. I was impressed. I asked how she got that gig, and she told me a story about her going to Tanzania to build a school. She decided to make a real difference.

Her story changed my attitude. I am certainly less snarky about kids going to do unskilled construction labor.

View on HN

I am certainly less snarky about kids going to do unskilled construction labor.

Most middle-class Americans could find a neighborhood within 15-minutes drive that could really use their help. But "my adventures in East Palo Alto" just isn't as exciting on a law school application, or a date, as "tales of Eritrea."

Pretty much this. Go to Habitat for Humanity and if you live in a city they'll generally be doing something local.

H4H was virtually packed when I volunteered. They had a waiting list for every college and university in the area. Apparently all those frats and sororities need a certain number of volunteer hours. Summertime, when building projects are usually in full swing, they didn't have nearly enough volunteers as the students typically were home or interning.

It's not volunteer work if the school, fraternity or sorority requires it of you.

It's not voluntary if it's a requirement to get into the school/frat.

It's more like free forced labor that most of the time is not even needed by the non-profit but hey the kids need certain hours so let's make the move garbage from one trash can to the other all day and if they finish early make them move it back.

"let's make the move garbage from one trash can to the other all day and if they finish early make them move it back"

Perhaps you were going for humor but locally some (mostly religious) high schools have mandatory required volunteer (LOL) graduation requirements, and criminal court "community service" also means work at the same recycling center, so you end up with a weird and probably very unhealthy mixture of ex-cons and teens at the recycling center basically "doing time" moving stuff from one dumpster to another all day. The weirdest part of the whole situation is its perceived as a social good.

Well, the teens learn some discipline and following orders. The criminals learn not to do whatever it is that got them community service. Everyone wins.

I think the fear is the mixture. So you take impressionable youth and force them under legal obligation to spend more time with elders of their socioeconomic group who selected a life of crime often than time spent with their own parents. What could possibly go wrong? Optimistically they'll be scared straight, but ...

It's not like they're sending people sentenced to 40 years hard labor for robbing a bank to community service at the recycling center. They're probably mixing with people who got first-offense drunk driving or disturbing the peace charges.

Or GHASP having plant material in their possession!

You make it sound so black and white when in reality everything is gray.

I happen to know a few "criminals" and they're not bad people they just choose to do shady stuff. Although I've met a few that i instinctively distanced myself from because you can tell they're always out to trick you or get something from you it's usually not that simple.

Some of them were even punished way out of proportion to the severity of their crime.

I don't know if most kids have the skill to deal with these people and since the crafty ones come off as overly friendly they might even get lured in.

It's probably not idea to mix clueles teens with street smart criminals.

I disagree entirely!

Otherwise sheltered teens likely have at least enough family resources and support that a couple hours of supervised contact isn't going to turn them into rampaging criminals, and dealing with people who aren't on a track straight into college and then into elite employment will make them more grounded.

My friends and I got community service for trespassing a few years back. We were assigned to a building material recycling center. Some of the people sentenced to work there were doing the minimum work required to not be reported, but there were a bunch of people, including my friends and I, who genuinely saw it as an opportunity to help out. We worked hard and put in as much effort as we would if it was our normal job. Would I have rather been making money or doing something fun with my friends? Of course. But I committed a crime and this was my punishment. Except I could actually see how my punishment was benefitting society, unlike being jailed or fined. Plus, I actually learned a little bit about different types of wood, and that there is actually a building material recycling center where you can buy a bunch of cool house stuff for cheap.

In other words, I think community service works.

People volunteer for all sorts of reasons that fit your description -- b/c they're required by a school/frat, b/c it's a requirement (or even an elective) to earn a badge in boy/girl scouts, b/c they feel pressured by others in their community (e.g. in a church), b/c their parents made them.

You may feel that some (maybe even most) people's motivations are less pure than others, but that doesn't make their actions "not volunteer work".

All these organisations clearly spell out what they expect from you when you sign up. Community service is a major component for a lot of them.

> It's more like free forced labor that most of the time is not even needed by the non-profit

H4H: You sign up, you show up, you learn a few things. Labour is still the biggest part of construction so your contribution is noted and essential.

> But "my adventures in East Palo Alto" just isn't as exciting on a law school application

You're wrong on that one. Talking about volunteering every weekend in East Palo Alto will get you a lot further on a law school application than your essay on a week in Africa. Admissions staff aren't stupid. Strong commitment to local activism is valued much more than paying large sums of money to travel halfway around the world on a glorified vacatiion.

I agree with this comment.

While I have no idea about Law School applications and what will help you getting in, I do know that as the leader of the volunteering club in high school and spending four years helping in the community was a lot more interesting in college interviews than other things I had on there.

However the opportunity I took in college to go to Africa (North Western Zambia) to build a data entry system and the back end database to digitalize the records of a hospital tended to get a lot more attention when looking for jobs than any of my more relevant internships did.

When I read these articles like the main link I feel happier about what I did. I finished pretty quickly and then spent time training but the majority of the time after the database was built was doing whatever else was needed but my inability to do a lot of the things well they seemed to tolerate with such kindness since what I was good at was already completed.

I'm not sure I understand how the law school would be "stupid" for being indifferent to local vs 3rd-world volunteerism, let alone strongly preferential to the former.

3rd-world volunteerism involves working without any of the amenities you take for granted (e.g. using different toilets), so it's not much of a vacation, and it involves helping people who are a lot worse off materially than "ghetto" kids. Unless law schools started getting nativist recently, of course ...

> I asked how she got that gig, and she told me a story about her going to Tanzania to build a school. She decided to make a real difference.

When you (or she) don't explain how she got from A to B, your epiphany has a lot less force. Most kids that come back from these trips seem to have no idea that they weren't helping. How did she realize it? How did she do something about it? How did she start actually doing something?

Use your imagination? Someone wants to help, goes to A, someone else there will be paying attention to how that person is behaving, how effective or ineffective etc. Call it simply human behavior or scouting or what not. For most of the visitors that's it, they'll be thanked at the end and feel good, but some might get a call or an email at some point to ask of they want to be more involved with B.

So basically, you're saying that these trips are tech company interviews?

If it was a tech company interviews, they'd grill her for 8 hours about how she would implement a new branch of chlorine halocarbon organic chemistry, invent a P=NP solution to the traveling salesman problem to minimize her drive time, drill her on NMR spectrum analysis even though she'll never use a NMR on the job, sit thru an explanation of how they only want rock stars, and then, if she's a real bro and fits in with the hard partying culture and isn't too old (LOL) then she can get that entry level bench tech job, for a little while, till they run out of money.

More like a weed out class in college. It gets the volunteer some exposure to X and gets rid of the ones who aren't going to be worth more time and effort.

Yeah, I didn't explain it well. The first trip was with her church, and the job was 5 years and an engineering degree later. It was the first trip that sparked the interest and gave a comfort level with the country.

A friend went down to Central America with a group to do basic construction stuff. They were all from the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, where the majority of construction laborers are from Central America, so it seemed odd. On the other hand, the volunteers did have passports to get back into the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com