Chances are that, if you arrived to
this blog through Google by searching “volunteer Cambodia”,
“volunteering Cambodia”, “Cambodia volunteer”, “volunteer
teaching in Cambodia” or something similar, you have first visited
another website (which ranks first for many of those keywords) that
offers an opportunity to volunteer in Cambodia for just 1,100 $ per 1
week. Additional weeks are less expensive, but nothing that I would
call “cheap”.
If you take a look at the dictionary,
it defines volunteer as:
So if I want to volunteer, I expect to
do something that would normally be a job without getting a salary.
That's my idea: performing a task without getting money for doing it.
But plenty of organizations and companies like the mentioned on the
first paragraph offer volunteering in exchange of big amounts of
money. Then you are not paying to volunteer. Someone only pays to buy
goods or services. How come I'm the one suppose to pay (1,100 $ per week!) if, by
definition, I'm the one offering a service? Well, the answer is that
I wouldn't be paying to volunteer: I would be paying to live in a
resort, for some tour to Angkor Wat or to go trekking. I would feel
like I'm actually a customer who is allowed to do some activity just
for the sake of having him happy. Performance or skills don't matter;
having a happy customer does. In the best case you pay to get some
training, but again, that's not volunteering.
At BCDO (and some other places that
actually look for volunteers and not for customers) you can choose to
stay and eat wherever you want. Even if you would like to live in a
resort it wouldn't be convenient, as there are none anywhere around
the village. They charge 25$ per week for food and a (humble) place
to sleep, but you can stay at the near guesthouse, look for a home
stay, eat at a restaurant or the market and just come to the school
to actually volunteer for free.
My idea while looking for a place to
volunteer was to find some project where they needed me, not just
another customer and his money. I don't need to find a place where
they let me volunteer for free; volunteering IS free. If not, I'm not
volunteering but paying money for something else. Maybe, as a newbie
to volunteering, I'm an idealistic. Or maybe I just have no idea
about how the world works.
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