While great on paper, short-term service trips can cause more harm than good without proper training and preparation, according to Shikha Chandarana ’17. Now, Chandarana is trying to get the word out and change that.

“In a lot of cases, if not done ethically and not done well, service trips and all of this stuff — it’s not always helpful,” said Chandarana, whose own service work includes a gap year spent working in Indian orphanages. “Fortunately, there’s a lot of things organizations can do to actually create change, … and almost all of it can be done with better education and better understanding,” she added in an interview with the Justice.

In order to better educate the community and spark dialogue on the issue, Chandarana organized a panel of speakers, which addressed students on Wednesday. During the event, student and faculty panelists touched on their own service work, explaining how volunteer trips still fall short.

Students can best prepare themselves for service trips by reading up on the local culture, Chandarana said, adding that students must also know their own limits — she cited an example of a pre-med student playing doctor in volunteer clinics.

“Handling that kind of privilege with extreme caution is very important,” Prof. Anita Hannig (ANTH) told students at the panel, urging those considering volunteering to consider their motivations for going and set realistic goals about what they wish to accomplish.

Prof. Greg Childs (AAAS) added that learning about and interacting with the local community is almost as crucial as the work itself. He cited one example of a conference he went to in Ghana, during which the attendees hardly acknowledged the locals and acted as though they were doing the community a favor by simply being there. “Your labor, your work can be a gift. You yourself are not a gift,” Childs emphasized. “Think about how you want to engage people every day. Think about everyday life.”

This training and education is so crucial because, without it, volunteers might misunderstand the needs of the community, Prof. Gowri Vijayakumar (SOC) asserted. She gave an example of foreign service workers trying to “liberate” Indian sex workers, despite the fact that many workers don’t want or need it. “Sometimes you might be wrong about what you think they need,” Vijayakumar said.

In her interview with the Justice, Chandarana added that these trips might also cause harm to the local communities. She cited a July 31, 2012 CNN article, which describes the adverse effect well-intentioned orphanage tours have on places like Siem Reap, Cambodia, where the constant slew of wealthy visitors has created a market for orphans in the town.

Ultimately, for students looking to go on service trips, the best way to avoid causing harm to local communities is to research what the organization offering the trip is asking of participants, Chandarana explained.

But, in a larger sense, an ethical service trip involves a lengthy process of interacting with the community and understanding the local culture, she said.

And at the end of the day, Chandarana emphasizes, “Think of this as not a pro- or anti-volunteering thing. We all have different opinions about it, and this is not a debate; it’s not a battle of that. I think this is all about trying to make ourselves more aware.”

The panel and the resulting dialogue is just a starting point for creating a larger campus-wide discussion, which will culminate in a student working group on ethical service, which will generate a syllabus on ethical service trips, she said. This syllabus will ideally go to the University’s Department of Community Service, where it will serve as a guideline for students looking to help out around the world.