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who researched the role of sending organizations hunger and you will come away with an amazing sense of achievement and hopefully pride in what you have done’ (Gap-year.com, 2008). As Simpson notes, such descriptions highlight the ‘otherness’ of host communities by simply defining them by their needs.Because volunteer projects frequently involve participants from developed nations working in developing nations (Higgins- Desbiolles and Russell-Mundine, 2008), it is true that volunteers will sometimes observe levels of poverty with which they are unfamiliar. Studies by Lepp (2008), Simpson (2004), Raymond and Hall (2008), and Ver Beek (2006) all found that volunteers commonly remark on how happy locals appear despite their lack of material wealth. Achieving a greater aware- ness of poverty in the developing world can certainly be valuable, and Lepp (2008) claims that ‘confronting global inequality and witnessing the resiliency of Kenyans in the face of it enabled volunteers to put their own problems in perspective’ (p. 94). However, Simpson (2004), Raymond and Hall (2008) and Ver Beek (2006) all voice concern that volunteers’ ‘poor- but-happy’ (Simpson, 2004, p. 688) remarks may indicate a rationalisation of poverty as a struggle that locals accept. For example, when discussing the Peruvians she has worked with, one volunteer interviewed by Simpson (2004) remarks (albeit apparently mistakenly with regard to the lack of televisions), ‘Here they don’t have TVs but it doesn’t bother them because they don’t expect one, I think they are a lot more grateful for what they get’ (p. 688). Similarly, Raymond and Hall (2008) were told by one volunteer to South Africa, ‘They don’t know any better and they haven’t had what we have so to them that’s quite normal and they’re quite happy being like that’ (p. 538). Simpson (2004) argues, ‘This [“poor-but-happy” attitude] in turn allows material inequality to be excused, and even justified, on the bases [sic] that “it doesn’t bother them” ’ (p. 688). In fact, Simpson even discovered that some volunteers came to romanticise ideas of poverty and associate it with social and emotional wealth.Simpson (2004) also found that many volunteers reacted to the poverty they observed by acknowledging their own luck in having been born into more favourable conditions. This recognition is certainly accurate, and Raymond
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