Certified Voluntourist
By Justin Zhang
August 26, 2022
From Wikipedia:
The term white savior is a sarcastic or critical description of a white person who is depicted as liberating, rescuing or uplifting non-white people; it is critical in the sense that it describes a pattern in which third world peoples are denied agency and are seen as passive recipients of white benevolence.
A few days ago, our wise old man Roger took a powerful moment to rise from his chair in a meeting with the parents of Kiburanga. He said something which shook my skull so violently, something which resonated in the way it usually does when someone says precisely what you are thinking at the moment you think it. It was after the parents and community leaders had taken the time to thoroughly thank our group and express their eternal gratitude. One parent had said it was God that had brought EWB to Kiburanga. For me, no matter how many times I receive thanks from this community (in a religious context or otherwise), I can say confidently that this gratitude is undeserved. I imagine Roger felt something similar as the storm clouds rolled in and our meeting neared its end. I don’t really remember his words exactly, so I’ll express his ideas with my own:
Parents, leaders, and children of Kiburanga: as much as you are grateful for us, we are forever in debt to you.
It is incredibly easy for Americans/Westerners and those who have not been here to see a lopsided story of our partnership with Kiburanga. It is easy to tell the story of a successful project made with American minds and to expect many thanks from them. It is easy to tell the story of (mostly white) saviors, and to portray the communities that we work with in a role of passive consumption of our benevolence. At its core, the mission of EWB is a (white) savior’s mission to “empower communities to meet their basic human needs”. What all these perspectives fail to recognize is that these “unempowered” communities like Kiburanga in fact have all the power, all the agency, and all the drive to create their own future. “Our” projects were made and expanded with Kenyan hands, Kenyan contractors, Kenyan equipment, Kenyan money, and ultimately with these Kenyan communities’ love and power. When I say that we are undeserved of their thanks, I believe it comes from our team’s realization that we are not empowerers and we are not saviors; We are the ones who have been empowered and saved.
I am very proud of the role our team has made for itself, but if not empowerers or saviors (or even engineers, for that matter), how can we redefine our responsibility as an EWB team, what can we really provide to Kuria? The problem with this question is that in several ways our work in EWB is selfish. We sacrifice very little from the comfort of our cozy dorms and grand dining halls of Princeton, yet enjoy several privileges of choice. We choose to spend our time volunteering, traveling, experiencing new cultures and new foods. We choose to spend thousands of our funding dollars on travel expenses and we have chosen to receive the love and thanks of Kiburanga’s children. At the end of the day, I believe we are and should be learners to a much greater extent than we are volunteers and engineers. We can contain our role very simply as students …. and big buckets for rich Princeton alumni to pour their money into. By understanding our position as (relatively wealthy, mostly white) students at an elite institution in the United States, we can recognize that the people and leaders of Kuria are more than capable enough of digging their own boreholes and constructing their own water systems (given they have enough funds). We can see ourselves as re-distributors of the time and money which the West has so liberally taken from so called “disadvantaged” communities.
By understanding our role as learners, we can create a learning experience for ourselves which makes us better engineers and evolve the professional field itself. We can learn to be engineers who truly understand what it means for a project to be sustainable, engineers with a holistic understanding of community power, engineers who are also organizers, mentors, and leaders in the pursuit of engineering justice, and engineers with a capacity for empathy and love for the many diverse people on this earth. We can be engineers…… without boundaries???? :)))