Word: tours
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...recreational highlights. Ambassadors for Children volunteers, for example, who range from teenagers to retirees, pay $2,025 for 11 days in South Africa (airfare and lodging included), spending about a week with children infected with or orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Plus, they get a daylong safari as well as a tour of the Robben Island prison that held Nelson Mandela for 18 years. In Thailand, Globe Aware charges $1,090, not including airfare, for a week split between teaching English to impoverished schoolchildren and visiting floating markets or trekking through temple ruins. These kinds of blended experiences...
Sally Brown, founder of Ambassadors for Children, counters that every bit helps. "If a kid can be held for a couple of days," she says, "you're able to make a small difference." Other tour operators stress that voluntourism really does have lasting impact because, despite rapid turnover among individual volunteers, trip organizers develop long-term relationships with community partners. On one of her first group trips to El Salvador in 2001, explains Nancy Rivard, who founded Airline Ambassadors to expand on relief work she began as a flight attendant for American Airlines, volunteers helped 150 families acquire land...
...poorly directed volunteers can produce more harm than good. Voluntourists have gone to her complaining about groups that repeated projects already finished by earlier crews or did work considered at odds with the local people's desires. With new companies entering a sector that is still largely unregulated, tour operators sometimes take advantage of even the best-intentioned volunteers, Barnett explains. "It's a new form of colonialism, really," she says. "The market is geared toward profit rather than the needs of the communities." Tourism Concern is developing a code of ethical conduct for the international volunteering sector...
...Such growing pessimism among cycling enthusiasts has organizers of the Tour and the sport's global body worried. And worried they should be. A recent poll in France's Journal du Dimanche showed that while 52% of respondents said they still loved France's marquee sporting event, 78% also said they always or often doubted the winners of the Tour and other cycling races did so without using performance-enhancing products. Of those, 80% thought the best way to battle doping in cycling was to ban offenders for life; 9% felt doping was now so integral to the sport that...
...this new territory for the Army also brings something of a new experience for the soldiers of 1-15 Infantry. Many of these men are in Iraq for their second or third tour of duty. But the new counter-insurgency doctrine of Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, means American reinforcements are not simply driving through the area on excursions from large bases; they have set up several combat outposts where the focus is forging relationships with the community...