What distinguishes service expeditions from ‘poverty tourism’?

By Doug Robinson

Chuck Mercier

PALUNG, Nepal — You can get fixated and overwhelmed by the poverty and challenges of life in Nepal, but there is a certain poetry to it all if you stop long enough to listen and look. The birds sing the sun up while the ubiquitous feral dogs collapse in the dust to sleep off a long night of barking and fighting (mostly under my window). The children trickle down from the surrounding hills into the schoolyard in their uniforms, their arms linked or draped around each others’ shoulders as they do everywhere they go.

High in the hillsides, where terraces have been carved like giant staircases, the women work in the fields, dressed in their brightly colored saris, dashes of crimson, blue and marigold against the green canvas of the hills, their hair combed and neatly bound, their bare feet caked with dark earth.

This is my mental photo album now that I am ensconced again at home in this American life, where there is so much comfort and ease that there is time to squabble over the use of pronouns in the din of American entitlement. My mind wanders back to the hard-scrabble existence of Nepal, where it is enough just to exist day to day, at a slow pace not even our children know anymore.

But I should digress. I should pause to tell you how I got here. What would possess someone to pay thousands of dollars to take a mind-numbingly long flight to the other side of the world, endure a stomach-tossing bus ride on mountain roads the size of golf cart paths, sleep on the floor of a schoolhouse, use a bucket of (cold) water to both shower and flush a hole-in-the-ground toilet (not at the same time), and perform manual labor for a few days?

That’s what I wondered when I found myself in the backcountry of Nepal in the summer of 2022 with 20 other volunteers from a wide variety of backgrounds — a former contractor, a schoolteacher, a carpenter, a former Navy helicopter pilot, a yoga instructor....

https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2023/4/5/23433680/nepal-service-trip-what-is-poverty-tourism