Thoughts on Tourism in Our Time:
I have been very fortunate to have had many opportunities to travel in my lifetime. My mom is from England, so I have traveled around Europe a lot since I was younger. I also have family in Barcelona and Scotland, so I am able to visit them there as well. Driven by my interest in Spanish and Science, I first traveled to Latin America on a field studies expedition Costa Rica in the 8th grade. Young and carefree, I remember being fascinated by the new environment and people around us. In 9th grade, I went on a Wilderness Ventures outdoors and service trip in Peru. The service we did there was very superficial and disappointing. We helped build a garden in one town, and the townspeople ended up having to help with most of it. We also painted the playground of a school, which was not very necessary or needed. The hiking, kayaking, and white-water rafting part of the trip was amazing, but not very connected to the culture. I experienced my first ever “glamping” hiking trip (glamorous camping), where all of our belongings were carried by native people hired to carry our things, and the food and tents were all set up when we arrived as the workers had gone on ahead of us. I came back from the trip excited about my exposure to Peru, but I knew there was something off about the service and interactions with the people there.
The next summer, I knew I wanted to do something different; I wanted to do something more real and meaningful. I applied to a program called Global Public Service Academy for Health (GPSA), and went to the mountains in Guatemala with a small group of 15 students for 5 weeks. A couple of months before the trip, we had textbook readings on the culture of Guatemala, healthcare concerns, history, and cultural competency. We had weekly Skype sessions with our team to discuss what we had learned, and to prepare ourselves for going into the culture. We spent 3 days all together in Guatemala City further drilling this information into our systems, working on group bonding, and perfecting our blood pressure and vitals skills. While we were there, we worked directly with a Casa Materna on week-long projects in 3 groups. One group taught hand-washing and teeth brushing in schools; one group went with the nurses from the Casa Materna to set up health clinics in run-down school houses, taking vitals and BP, weighing babies, giving out vitamins and supplements, giving vaccines, and giving presentations on health; and the last group went with Casa Materna nurses to do house calls to patients with more serious injuries and patients who lived too far away to go to the clinics. A separate group of people also worked on a stove project, where they built stoves that give off less smoke and taught community members how to build them with accessible materials. Every night we would all come together for a lecture on some aspect of the history, culture, diseases, and languages of Guatemala, and in the last week we each had a topic we would present on. On the weekends we stayed with host families, and we got to know them very well. This trip was one of the best experiences of my life. It solidified my interest in Medicine and Global Health, and some particular experiences I had completely changed my perception of the world.
I loved GPSA so much, that I applied to be a leader for the next trip to Guatemala. This time, I had to do an independent research project throughout the school-year, which I would implement when we got to Guatemala. I chose maternal health and nutrition, and made a public health talk which I delivered in health clinics, and I made pamphlets in Spanish on maternal nutrition, which I brought with me to Guatemala. This year, we were based in a city called Xela, and we lived with host families the entire time. The experience was wildly different from the secluded time in the mountains of Calhuitz, but taught me so much about city life and different aspects of Guatemalan culture.
On both of my trips to Guatemala, I truly felt as though I was able to make a difference to the people who we were giving medical care to. The preparation on cultural competency, history and culture of Guatemala made a major difference in how the group acted as tourists and volunteer workers.
This past summer, I went on a medical-anthropology expedition in the Himalayan mountains in India. We had some required reading beforehand to prepare ourselves. Anthropology professors traveled with us and gave daily lectures, we camped in passes, visited and interviewed nuns and monks, did yoga every morning, and studied the culture around us. We were able to help out with a medical group doing service in the area. After the trip, I traveled around Rajasthan with a friend, just being a tourist. My experiences in India were very different in the Himalayas and in Rajasthan. The program was not very organized, and I don’t think that the group was fully culturally competent, which made me very frustrated. In Rajasthan, my friend and I were very conscious about being respectful and knowledgeable about everything we were doing, but at the same time, it is almost impossible to be a tourist and not make a culturally insensitive mistake. Something that I struggled with was photography. I am very interested in photography, and I love taking pictures of the wide range of beautiful humans around the world. At the same time, I had to be aware of my place, and whether it was appropriate to take pictures in each place I was in. Photography was just one example of the many internal conflicts I had with myself, trying to make sure I was being culturally sensitive, but also pushing boundaries to learn as much as I could from my experience.
From my tourist experiences, I think that the most important thing a tourist must do before coming into a country is to fully prepare themselves to be culturally competent. That means learning the history, culture, languages, food-types, customs, health-problems, and lifestyles of the people in the place they are visiting, and being prepared to accept the people’s lifestyles and decisions even if they disagree with them.