I Went to Ecuador to Help. Then I Started Questioning Who Volunteering Was Really Helping

Two weeks volunteering with children in Quito gave me access to a side of Ecuador I would probably never have experienced as a tourist. It also left me deeply uncomfortable with an industry that can turn helping people into something travellers buy.

On my first morning volunteering in Quito, I was given some fairly straightforward advice: don't take my phone, don't carry money I wasn't prepared to lose and, whatever happened, don't lose Jordy.

Jordy was an Ecuadorian university student volunteering with the programme. He had collected us from the shared house and was taking us across Quito on public transport.

The bus was absolutely rammed. I had only recently arrived in South America for the first time, my Spanish was basic, and I was following Jordy through a part of Quito I knew absolutely nothing about.

Eventually, we arrived at Las Cuadras Market.

But we didn't go to a classroom.

We started walking around the market collecting children. One by one, they joined us as we moved between the stalls.

I remember following everyone around thinking, Where exactly are we going to teach them?

Then we walked outside, into the car park and into a cage.

Suggested caption: My first volunteering placement in southern Quito, where lessons took place alongside the market.

The Classroom in the Car Park

Calling it a cage sounds unnecessarily dramatic until you actually describe it. It was essentially a fenced-off section of the car park, with tarpaulin around parts of it to create some privacy.

This was the classroom.

And yet one of the first things Ecuador taught me was not to confuse a lack of resources with a lack of good people.

The session was being led by María, a local teacher who was giving up part of her own summer to work with the children. María couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak enough Spanish to communicate properly with her, so Jordy became our translator.

That first day, I wasn't expected to arrive as some British saviour and start teaching. Thankfully. I was new, María knew the children, and I was perfectly happy observing and helping.

We made little spyglasses and then went hunting for pictures of rabbits we'd coloured in. It was fun, the children were having fun, and nothing about that first morning made me think I'd made a mistake coming to Ecuador.

Quite the opposite.

I thought this was brilliant.

Safeguarding note for publishing: use activity photographs that do not unnecessarily identify individual children unless appropriate consent was obtained.

I Hadn't Come to Ecuador to Save Anyone

I didn't arrive in Ecuador with some grand plan to transform children's lives.

I'd never been to South America. I wanted to travel somewhere new, improve my Spanish and, if possible, use some of my time to help children while I was there. That sounded worthwhile.

Someone I knew had previously volunteered through the same company, International Volunteer HQ (IVHQ), and had told me they'd had an amazing experience.

So I booked it.

I'd also asked people back home for donations before travelling and arrived with loads of art and educational resources for the children. I genuinely wanted to be useful. Increasingly, I also wanted to use the skills I already had rather than simply being another pair of hands.

At another placement at Plaza Comercial Michelena, María and Jordy were there again, but the international volunteers taught the first part of the session before María took over.

When I arrived, I was volunteering alongside a French couple who had already been there for about a week. They'd planned the lesson, so I followed their lead.

But I was itching to have a go myself.

How Safe Is Ecuador for Solo Travellers?

This experience also took me into parts of Quito far beyond the normal tourist route. Read what travelling through Ecuador actually felt like and how it compared with the warnings I'd heard before going.

Then I Tried Teaching My Own Lesson

Art was an obvious place for me to start. I had the donated materials with me, it was something I knew I could teach, and I thought I could combine it with English.

So I planned a lesson around colours.

There was also a slightly ridiculous symmetry to it. I'd been taking Spanish lessons myself and had only just learnt the colours in Spanish. Now I was going to teach the children the same vocabulary in English.

And they were really good at it.

Red, blue, green and yellow. They were getting them incredibly quickly.

For a moment, it was easy to think, Wow. They're really learning this.

Then I realised why.

They'd done it before.

I hadn't suddenly discovered some extraordinary ability to teach English through art. I was repeating a lesson.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with repeating learning. In teaching, retrieval and revisiting previous knowledge can be incredibly valuable.

But effective repetition is deliberate.

Mine wasn't.

I didn't know what they'd learnt last week. I didn't know what they'd learnt the week before that. I didn't know which vocabulary they could already use confidently or what the previous volunteer had intended to teach next.

I'd simply arrived, thought colours will be a good lesson, and taught colours.

I began wondering how many volunteers before me had done exactly the same thing.

How Many Times Had They Learnt “Blue”?

Colours, animals, countries and feelings are perfect volunteer lessons. They're easy to prepare, visual, fun and allow you to teach a handful of individual English words in an afternoon.

The children respond, and you feel useful.

Then another volunteer arrives.

What unsettled me wasn't that the French volunteers didn't care. They absolutely did. It was watching how easy it was to interpret children knowing the answers as evidence of the profound difference we were making.

I could have done exactly the same thing. In fact, for a few minutes during my colours lesson, I basically had.

Maybe the volunteer before us had gone home thinking the same thing.

Maybe someone arriving after me would too.

That's when I started thinking less about individual volunteers and more about the system surrounding us.

I Didn't Want to Teach Another List of Words

Once I'd noticed it, I couldn't really ignore it.

I only had two weeks. I wasn't going to redesign an entire programme, and I certainly didn't understand these children's lives better than María or Jordy did.

But I could change what I did with the time I had left.

I wanted some progression.

Instead of leaving having taught another collection of individual words, I wanted the children to be able to put those words together.

Nothing revolutionary.

Just a sentence.

Something they could actually say to another person.

And one of the children who really seemed to want to learn was Benjamin.

Benjamin

Ben was brilliant.

I remember teaching animal names and him noticing something about Spanish and English. Some words were remarkably close. Change the ending, lose an o here and there, and suddenly a Spanish word started looking suspiciously like an English one.

Obviously, that isn't a rule you can apply to the entire English language.

Unfortunately.

But Ben had spotted a pattern, and he was excited about it.

So was I.

Those were the moments I loved most. Not because I thought I was changing his life, but because I was teaching, he was learning and something had clicked.

Avoid turning identifiable children into illustrative imagery for the ethical argument unless consent allows their photographs to be used.

“How Are You?”

On my last day, we were walking around the market again collecting the other children.

It was almost the reverse of my first morning.

By then, the market wasn't completely unfamiliar. I knew what we were doing, I knew the children and I knew where the classroom was.

Then Ben walked up to me.

Usually, the greeting was in Spanish.

“Profe! Profe!”

Not this time.

He looked at me and said:

“How are you?”

I lost it.

I don't even think I answered his question. I just remember shouting something like:

“BEN! YOU CAN SPEAK ENGLISH!”

I was ridiculously proud of him.

I still am.

And I hope he's continued with his studies.

But there is something important I have to acknowledge when I tell that story: I don't know how much English Benjamin eventually learnt. I don't know whether he remembers me. I don't know whether that sentence became the beginning of years of learning English or whether, eventually, he forgot it.

I don't get to turn one sentence into evidence that my two weeks in Ecuador changed his life.

He learnt something.

I got to be his teacher for part of that process.

That's enough.

So Was Volunteering in Ecuador Actually Helping?

This is where my feelings about the experience become complicated.

There were people doing something valuable.

María was giving up her summer. Jordy was volunteering while at university. There were children who wanted to learn, and there were volunteers who genuinely cared.

I believe I contributed something while I was there.

Research into volunteer tourism doesn't support a simple conclusion that international volunteering is always harmful either. Studies have found that programmes can generate social connections, knowledge, resources and other benefits for host communities.

The problem is that outcomes depend heavily on how programmes are structured and, critically, whose needs determine that structure.

My discomfort was somewhere else.

I had paid to be there.

And that changed the question.

When Helping Becomes Something You Buy

I volunteered through International Volunteer HQ.

My two-week programme fee was US$525.

I also paid:

• US$151 for Spanish lessons;

• US$55 for an Andean art class; and

• US$50 for a Quito cultural heritage tour.

  
  

Those extras are easy for me to understand.

I paid for a Spanish lesson and somebody taught me Spanish. I paid for an art class and received an art class. I paid for a tour and went on a tour.

The programme fee is more complicated.

IVHQ explains that programme fees cover the cost of hosting volunteers, including accommodation, breakfast, airport collection, orientation and in-country support. It also states that programme fees contribute towards locally driven initiatives and employment opportunities.

Those things cost money.

Local staff should be paid. Accommodation costs money. Administration costs money. Running an international volunteer programme costs money.

So I cannot tell you that my $525 disappeared into somebody's pocket.

I have no evidence that it did.

What I can tell you is that while I was standing in a fenced-off classroom in a market car park, I couldn't tell how much of the money I'd paid translated into better educational provision for the children standing beside me.

And that bothered me.

The Part of Voluntourism That Doesn't Sit Right With Me

The company had undoubtedly provided something valuable to me.

It housed me, organised my placement, connected me with Jordy and María, and gave me access to a community I probably would never have encountered if I'd remained inside Quito's tourist bubble.

It also gave me an experience I'll remember for the rest of my life.

That's precisely what makes me uncomfortable.

I was the customer.

That doesn't automatically mean the children were a product, or that the people running the programme were treating them as one.

But it does mean the experience had been packaged and sold to me.

I had paid for access to a volunteering placement, and part of what I received was the feeling of being useful.

That is a difficult relationship to ignore when the people at the centre of the experience are children.

Research into voluntourism has wrestled with the same contradiction. International volunteers can bring money, skills, resources and connections into communities. At the same time, researchers have questioned programmes where the transformation of the volunteer becomes more prominent than the long-term outcomes for the people supposedly being helped.

Research has also highlighted how much discussion of voluntourism focuses on what volunteers gain from the experience rather than what happens to host communities after those volunteers leave.

When children are involved, continuity becomes even more important.

Current British government guidance recommends investigating how volunteer projects are monitored, how local partnerships operate and whether volunteers can genuinely provide the skills a community needs.

None of that proves that what I experienced in Quito was harmful.

I don't think it would be fair to claim that.

But it does validate the question I came home asking:

Who is the programme ultimately designed around?

The child who will still be there next month?

Or me, the traveller who has two weeks available and wants to help?

Charity Shouldn't Be About How It Makes Me Feel

This is probably the biggest thing Ecuador changed about how I think about charity.

Helping someone can make you feel incredible.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

I was ecstatic when Benjamin said, “How are you?”

I was proud of him, and proud that something we'd worked on had stuck. I'd be lying if I pretended I got nothing emotionally from that.

But feeling good cannot be the measure of whether you've done good.

Those are completely different things.

When we pay companies to provide experiences in which we get to feel useful, I think we have an obligation to ask harder questions.

The purpose cannot be giving me a profound experience.

It cannot be producing a photograph of me surrounded by smiling children.

And it cannot be allowing me to fly home convinced I've transformed somebody's life after teaching them the word blue without knowing whether five volunteers taught them blue before me.

The person receiving help doesn't owe us personal growth, gratitude or a story.

They certainly don't owe us the feeling that we're a good person.

What Ecuador Changed When I Came Home

The experience didn't make me decide that helping abroad was always wrong.

It made me realise that I didn't need to travel to the other side of the world to make a difference.

Charity is needed everywhere.

There are people and organisations in my own community that need support, time and practical help. I could volunteer locally, donate locally and use the skills I already had without assuming that meaningful charity had to involve an international flight.

That was one of the most useful things I brought home from Ecuador: a broader understanding of where help is needed.

Volunteering abroad can be worthwhile, but it shouldn't make us overlook the people who need help closer to home.

Would I Volunteer Abroad Again?

Yes.

I would, and I will.

But I would ask very different questions before I booked it.

I'd want to know who identified the need for international volunteers. I'd want to know whether local professionals could perform the role instead and whether the money would be better spent employing them.

I'd want to know what skills volunteers are expected to bring, whether there is continuity between one volunteer and the next, and whether the programme has a curriculum, assessment or at least a handover showing what the children already know and what they are working towards.

I'd want to understand the safeguarding arrangements and receive a much clearer explanation of where my money went.

Most importantly, I'd ask a question I didn't really know to ask before Ecuador:

If I wasn't going to have an amazing experience doing this, would the programme still exist in the same form?

Because if the answer is no, perhaps the volunteer experience has become too central to the programme.

And when the programme involves children, that's something I'm no longer comfortable ignoring.

The Thing I Hope Benjamin Remembers

I don't need Benjamin to remember me.

I'd like him to. Of course I would.

But that isn't why I hope he continued learning English.

I hope he continued because he wanted to.

I hope María kept teaching.

I hope another volunteer arrived with something useful to contribute.

And I hope that volunteer knew Benjamin could already say:

“How are you?”

Because I'd hate for them to teach him it again and fly home thinking they'd changed his life.

Thinking About Volunteering Abroad?

Research the organisation as carefully as you'd research the destination.

Ask who runs the project locally, what qualifications volunteers need, how children or vulnerable people are safeguarded, what happens between successive volunteers, how progress is measured and exactly what your fees pay for.

The FCDO recommends researching an organisation's local partnerships, track record, monitoring and quality assurance before volunteering overseas.

Helping abroad can be worthwhile, and I would volunteer abroad again.

But volunteering locally can be just as meaningful, and charity is needed everywhere.

Don't assume that because an experience feels meaningful to you, it must automatically be meaningful to the people you've travelled there to help.

Continue Reading Ecuador

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How Safe Is Ecuador Really? What Travelling There Taught Me About Fear, Crime and Other People's Warnings

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