I regretted doing a volunteering project in Fiji

Originally submitted as one of my degree portfolios, published on Wixsite.

Colonial Legacies and Intercultural Awareness 

As an international student in the UK from Malaysia, a country shaped by its own colonial history under British rule, I have become increasingly aware of how colonial legacies influence everyday intercultural encounters, for instance, the assumption of Western superiority or the notion that English fluency equates to intelligence. This awareness intensified during a mental health volunteering project in Fiji in my second year, organised by [redacted].

Before I even joined the programme, I remember questioning what it meant for me, as a student from a previously colonised country, to participate in a volunteering project in another former British colony.

This suspicion was closely tied to my understanding of voluntourism. Conran (2011) defines voluntourism as “an activity in which people pay to volunteer in development or conservation projects.” Even in this definition, I felt a tension: the act of paying to help already suggests unequal access to mobility and “helping” itself. I also came across critiques that voluntourism can resemble neo-colonial practice, in which development is framed by Western presence in non-Western spaces (Bandyopadhyay, 2019). This made me uneasy, because I was aware that even my presence might be read through that same lens.

A big part of this discomfort came from my own past experiences. Growing up in Malaysia, I often watched Western travel vlogs where creators documented their “volunteering experiences.” While some seemed well-intentioned, I often felt unsettled watching local communities being framed as passive recipients of help. As a local viewer, I sometimes felt my own culture was being simplified or “performed” for external audiences. Even when the intention was positive, it felt like what Said (1978) describes as the creation of an “us” versus “them” dynamic, where the Global South is positioned as something to be helped rather than understood as an equal.

During the interview, I was reassured that the project would work closely with local organisations and that cultural sensitivity training would be provided. At that point, I felt slightly more comfortable, and I wanted to believe that meaningful collaboration was possible. On the surface, it seemed like the programme was aware of the very issues I was worried about.

However, my lived experience in Fiji complicated this expectation.

Arrival in Fiji: Expectations vs Reality

When I arrived in the village, I quickly noticed a gap between what was promised and what was actually experienced. Although the project was framed as a mental health volunteering initiative, our preparation felt limited. Despite many of us being psychology students, we were not professionally trained to deliver mental health workshops. We were given some online cultural resources and a brief introduction to Fijian customs, but in practice, I did not feel fully prepared for the responsibility we were given.

At the time, I remember feeling conflicted. On one hand, I wanted to contribute meaningfully. On the other hand, I felt a quiet ethical discomfort: was I really in a position to “deliver” mental health awareness in a community that I had just entered?

This is where Woodward’s (2004) argument that “the politics of personal feeling cannot address the institutional reasons for injustice” became particularly apparent to me. Although I felt emotionally invested in the programme and genuinely cared about promoting mental health, I found myself questioning whether good intentions alone were enough. As passionate as I am about advocating for mental health, was I actually equipped to facilitate mental health workshops in a community I had only just entered? The programme gave me a sense of fulfilment, making me feel as though I was contributing something meaningful, yet I could not shake the feeling that my presence might reinforce the very inequalities I had been concerned about before arriving. Was I genuinely contributing to the wellbeing of the Fijian community, or was I simply satisfying my own desire to help? More importantly, could I unintentionally cause harm by discussing a topic that remains highly stigmatised in a cultural context I barely understood? I began to wonder whether my desire to "help" was, in some ways, a selfish one—driven more by my own sense of purpose than by the actual needs and priorities of the community.

The “Us vs Them” Dynamic in Practice

As I spent more time in the village, I began to observe how the “us versus them” dynamic manifested in everyday interactions.

In workshop settings and daily activities, there was a consistent tendency for volunteers and Fijians to occupy separate physical and social spaces. Volunteers would often sit together in one area, while Fijian participants remained in another. This separation was not formally enforced, but it became an unspoken norm that shaped interaction. Over time, it limited opportunities for organic engagement across groups.

This division was also reflected in how volunteers interacted with one another. The volunteers frequently moved as a collective group and tended to discuss their shared experience primarily among themselves.

Much of the conversation revolved around cultural references, travel experiences, and university life in the UK, topics that were familiar to them but often inaccessible to others outside that social context. Even as an international student in the UK, I sometimes struggled to fully engage in volunteers' conversations, as many references were rooted in specifically British or middle-class experiences, making it harder for Fijian participants to relate or participate.

My own difficulties joining these conversations, despite studying in the UK, made me realise how excluded Fijian participants might feel and suggested unspoken barriers to engagement. According to the Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), individuals naturally categorise themselves and others into in-groups and out-groups, even in the absence of explicit division. In Fiji, this categorisation was not imposed overtly but emerged through shared language, cultural familiarity, and group dynamics.

My Attempt at Bridging the Us VS Them Gap

However, I was not an exception to this “us versus them” phenomenon.

In my foster home, my host grandmother treated me with a level of hospitality that made me reflect more deeply on the relationship between “a local” and “a volunteer.” I remember being given a proper bed while she slept on a mattress, and being served food while I was rarely expected to help prepare it. Instead of feeling fully integrated, I often felt like a guest being honoured rather than a participant or volunteer contributing on equal terms. This made me reflect on how hospitality itself can reproduce subtle hierarchies, even when it is expressed through care and generosity.

Because of this discomfort, I consciously began to change my behaviour. I asked myself: how can I bridge this gap? The last thing I wanted was to be seen as a volunteer who needed to be fed or catered to; I wanted to be seen as someone who belonged.​I therefore began insisting on helping with cooking and washing dishes, even when it was not expected of me. I also joined my host grandmother on her evening visits around the village, choosing to participate in everyday life rather than remain within a detached “volunteer identity.” These small actions felt important because they helped reduce the passive role I felt I had been placed into and allowed me to engage more meaningfully in my daily routine.

Over time, I noticed that integration felt more natural for me compared to some other volunteers. I think part of this came from cultural familiarity. Certain aspects of Fijian social life felt recognisable to me, such as respect for elders, expectations around hospitality, and gendered norms of modesty. Even linguistic similarities played a role. I later learned that both Malay and Fijian languages belong to the broader Austronesian language family, which created moments of connection when I recognised similar-sounding words and used Malay terms that resonated with Fijian language patterns during interactions with neighbours.

Reciprocal Adaptation and Belonging

As a result, I began to feel that I had integrated relatively well into the community. My foster grandmother described me as being like her own granddaughter, and I also received a handwritten letter from my foster auntie thanking me for treating her children like siblings. These moments were deeply meaningful to me, as being recognised as part of the family reflected an important aspect of my own cultural understanding, where kinship language is often used to express closeness and belonging. I also developed inside jokes with Fijian youths, often exchanging local terms in jest. One recurring joke involved calling each other "devil," which emerged as a playful sign of our growing familiarity.

At the same time, I recognise that this sense of integration was shaped not by the absence of difference, but by how difference was negotiated. I am a Muslim woman who wears the hijab, while my host family were Christian. This initially made me more aware of boundaries between us. However, over time, these differences did not prevent closeness from forming. There was a moment where I shared a few of my hijabs with them during colder weather, and they wore them playfully, joking about “converting to Islam.” While light-hearted, this interaction reflected mutual openness, where cultural difference became something shared rather than strictly separated. On another occasion, a close Fijian friend jokingly handed me a hijab made from cow’s skin. These exchanges also showed that cultural learning was reciprocal, not one-directional.

As Hall & Bucholtz (2010) explain, identity is both positional and relational; it is shaped by how we see ourselves and how others position us. Through everyday interactions, I began to feel that I was no longer only “a volunteer from the UK system,” but someone who had been partially repositioned closer to the local community through relational practice and shared experience.

The Limits of Intimacy​

Looking back, I realised that my attempt to bridge the "us versus them" divide was itself not free from the very assumptions I was trying to resist. Throughout my reflection, I celebrated the relationships I had built with my host family and the ways I had become integrated into village life. I took comfort in being called a granddaughter, sharing inside jokes with Fijian youths, and feeling that cultural exchange had become reciprocal. At the time, these moments felt like evidence that I had overcome the distance often associated with voluntourism.

However, I later questioned whether I had unconsciously replaced the actual purpose of the programme with my own measure of success.

I was in Fiji as part of a mental health volunteering project, not a cultural immersion programme. While intimacy and mutual understanding were valuable outcomes, they were never the primary objective. Instead of asking whether the relationships I formed translated into meaningful improvements in mental health awareness, I found myself evaluating the experience based on how connected I felt to the community. In other words, I had shifted the focus from the community's outcomes to my own emotional experience.

This made me reconsider Lauren Berlant's (1998) argument that intimacy creates compelling narratives about shared lives and mutual understanding. My story of becoming "part of the family" was emotionally meaningful, but it also risked becoming exactly what Conran (2011) critiques within volunteer tourism: a narrative of personal transformation that obscures the structural inequalities upon which the encounter is built. Rather than asking whether the programme had achieved its intended goals, I had become invested in the story of my own integration.

More importantly, I began asking myself a more uncomfortable question: did my intimacy actually improve anyone's mental health?

The honest answer is that I do not know.

There were no formal evaluations measuring whether participants' understanding of mental health had changed. There were no follow-up assessments, engagement scales, or long-term indicators that could demonstrate whether the workshops had any lasting impact. Without these measures, I could not confidently claim that I had contributed to the community in the way the programme intended.

Instead, what I could clearly identify was my own growth. I became more culturally aware. I formed meaningful friendships. I learned about the Fijian way of life. I left feeling transformed.

But these were primarily my outcomes.

Reflecting on this, I realised that I may have been reproducing the very logic I had criticised before joining the programme. Voluntourism has long been criticised for benefiting volunteers more than host communities, allowing participants to accumulate cultural capital, strengthen their CVs, and develop narratives of global citizenship. In contrast, the impact on local communities remains uncertain. In celebrating my own transformation without demonstrating meaningful community outcomes, I risked perpetuating the same unequal relationship in which the volunteer's experience becomes the primary product of the encounter.

This also made me rethink the colonial mindset that initially concerned me before travelling to Fiji. Colonialism was often justified through claims of bringing civilisation, education, or development to others. Although my intentions were fundamentally different, I began to question whether I had nevertheless participated in a similar underlying logic: arriving in another community with the assumption that I had something valuable to offer, despite spending only a short period there and possessing limited understanding of the local context.

As Kathleen Woodward (2004, p. 71) reminds us, "the politics of personal feeling cannot address the institutional reasons for injustice." My emotional closeness to the community did not challenge the unequal structures that made the programme possible. If anything, it may have made those structures less visible by giving me a powerful personal story of connection and belonging.

This became the central tension of my experience. I was able to reduce the interpersonal distance between "us" and "them," but I could not confidently say that I had reduced the structural inequalities embedded within voluntourism itself. Rather than dismantling those inequalities, my own narrative of intimacy may have inadvertently reinforced them by shifting attention away from measurable community outcomes and towards my own emotional transformation.