I don't know what to talk about, but I want to talk about this…

Audrey Richardson

February 21, 2018, Health Behavior and Health Education, Students, Practice

As humans, we tend to revert to our own life experiences as indicators of how we should respond to certain situations. While I wait for these next few days to pass, I cannot help but wonder how this will all play out, and project my own experiences onto this situation.

Let me explain. I've joined this class, Public Health in Action, that pairs students with real-world projects to assess community health needs and identify methods that will reduce health inequities. Overall, it's been a pretty cool course - I've been in training these past two months and am about to head out to my project. My work site is in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (RGV). I'll be working with a research center to assess the needs of people living in colonias, which are unincorporated and unregulated neighborhoods that experience a scarcity in resources due to their isolation.

Throughout the class I've felt pretty positive about collaborating on this project, but during the last few days my positivity has wavered. You see, my team will only be out in the RGV for one week, and in class we read this article that noted how quick "service trips" usually cause more damage than good because they often exploit communities rather than help them, which I agree with. It's the reason why I avoided participating in such trips while growing up. My own community has dealt with the aftermath of voluntourism (which was immensely irritating), so why would I go and harm another? It's hard for me not to project my own experiences into this situation and think, "does the community really want us there? Are we doing more harm than good?" To be honest, I'm afraid of becoming the person who finds some way to rationalize their presence as a benefit to a community when their presence is anything but that (i.e. being the person who causes more harm than good).

I've talked about this fear with my classmates and realized that some of them are struggling with this too. In reality, our trip is not going to be anything like a traditional service trip; we are not walking into this thinking we are experts or saviors but are responding to a need that has been identified by the community itself. Still, for some reason, I am struggling with accepting this fact and am wondering if you have ever dealt with something like this.

What was the situation, and how did you get over your mixed feelings?