Reckoning Your Barbie Savior
You are a senior in college sitting at your Ikea desk in your room watching a documentary exposé on the corruption, neglect and abuse at a Ghanaian-run Children’s Welfare Home in Bawjiase. You see naked African children standing in line to be bathed. A little boy eating dry instant noodles. Children sharing a bowl of thin brown broth for dinner. Children sprawling lethargically on the ground. You see a boy push another boy off his wheelchair. You see a teacher, a grown man, repeatedly slapping a young boy. A child spooning watery porridge into the mouth of a toddler. “At what point is the street better than an orphanage?” the undercover reporter asks. “The Department of Social Welfare did not play its supervisory and monitoring role effectively.”
You watch the founder and CEO of the home, referred to as Auntie Emma, say to the camera, “Some orphanage homes misappropriate funds.” Auntie Emma holds a baby girl, who pulls on her dangly silver earring. “Over here whatever comes in, we deposit,” she says.“Management sits down, and we decide what to do.” Then you watch footage of Auntie Emma standing with a wad of cedi, the Ghanaian currency, in her hand as donated boxes of instant noodles, crates of evaporated milk and bags of clothing are bundled up. The undercover reporter says, “Most donated items found their way onto the open market soon after they had been donated.” You see children pose for a photo in front of a table of bananas, pineapples, toilet paper, detergent, Nestlé products. You pause the video on this frame. A blonde woman smiles in the back, holding a Ghanaian baby to her chest.
You could be this woman.
About nine months earlier, you are packing sunscreen, anti-malaria pills, loose tank tops, bubbles, streamers and frisbees into your suitcase when your iPhone pings. You’ve been added to a Facebook group with over fifty members, the majority of whom are young women in their twenties and thirties from the U.S., England, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
“The minister of gender and children services visited potters and concluded it was unhygienic for children to live there (some of the kids weren’t clothed, there’s puddles everywhere that mosquitos can breed in, etc) and decided to shut it down,” a woman who you’ve never met, named Nicole, messages.
You wonder if this means you won’t be spending the next month volunteering at the Potter’s Village children’s shelter in Dodowa. You planned to return to Potter’s for the first time in nearly four years because you didn’t want to become another one of those “Barbie Saviors” who abandons the children they decided to sponsor. During your gap year around the world as a naive nineteen-year-old, you decided to sponsor two preteens and one of them, thirteen-year-old Maxwell, had been Facetime calling you, asking you to come back, and you don’t want to exacerbate his abandonment issues, so you decide to go back and write about your experiences. You’re convinced you’ll do things “right” this time and focus all your energy on the children, but if you’re being honest with yourself, you also want to enjoy the sunshine, fresh fruit and slower pace of life in the sleepy village of Dodowa. You’re looking forward to being unplugged from the world and kicking back with a good book under the shade of a mango tree.
You read the rest of Nicole’s message. Nicole says our top priority is to buy mattresses and bed frames because the minister will want to make sure each child has an individual mattress, but Nicole is also confused. “Please if any of you have heard anything different let me know because everything has been all over the place the last couple of days,” she writes. You frantically scroll through hundreds of other messages. Maddie, Amber and Lilly say they will start fundraising and reaching out to people for help. Nicole sends a link to her GoFundMe page. A woman named Sarah emailed the Ministry and said volunteers are able to provide financial support, but we should not be a part of the long-term solution, which you don’t think makes much sense. You feel guilty that you aren’t as impassioned as these other volunteers. You feel guilty that you didn’t “fall in love” with the Potter’s kids, like the other volunteers, and postpone college or change your life plan in order to spend more months in Dodowa. You feel guilty that you thought sponsoring two preteens would prove your altruism. You feel guilty for wishing you could remove yourself from this thorny mess, for wishing you could retract your sponsorship commitment just as easily as you could remove a splinter from your finger.
You learn that Potter’s Village is in the process of moving from the old, cramped, bedbug-infested site to a new, more spacious site where many of the buildings are still under construction. You learn that the founder and CEO, a Ghanaian woman referred to as Mama Grace, has been identified as a “substandard individual.” The management of Potter’s Village, which consists almost entirely of Mama Grace’s biological children, is being questioned. You learn that most children in Ghanaian orphanages actually have living parents. And there is a new government initiative to return children to their families or place them in foster care. But the majority of the volunteers in the Facebook group are working directly against this initiative.
Everyone seems to think that if we donate more money, the conditions of Potter’s will improve, and Social Welfare will go away. “We can all agree that Potter’s isn’t up to standards but that’s why we have all been putting in help with the new site,” a woman named Molly messages. Everyone assumes that if Potter’s is shut down, there would be no help or plan for the children afterwards, so they’ll just be thrown on the streets or returned to families who can’t feed or educate them.
Only a few people suggest that Potter’s getting shut down might be inevitable, so we should look to support the children as they relocate. “We have to be careful that this whole thing is not getting emotional,” a guy named Tony says. He reminds us that we’re on the side of the children.
You wonder, what is the best option for the children? You remember Mama Grace’s red lipstick cracking in the heat when she smiled and said “God Bless you” after you handed her a stack of cedi equivalent to $1,000 in donation money. You remember when Mama Grace’s daughter, Martha, asked some healthcare volunteers what they could do to “cure” baby Benjamin’s Down syndrome. You remember children being forced to worship late into the night, singing “Jesus Loves Me” and getting hit when they dozed off. Children sleeping on the dusty stone floors of the courtyard. You remember a five-year-old girl help a toddler use a broom to sweep his poop into the stench of stagnant gutters. You remember being told to teach the first graders “whatever you want” because the school at Potter’s Village had no curriculum, textbooks or classrooms. You remember the line of children outside the medicine cabinet at night asking you to clean and bandage their sores and wounds. You remember ten-year-old Maxwell’s cracked, concaved spoon fingernails, a sign of iron deficiency. You remember Maxwell pointing to a homework question and asking you to read it.
You wonder if it is in the best interest of the children to stay at Potter’s Village.
You are thinking about canceling your flight. You call your mom, cry into the phone, tell her everything’s “so fucked up,” and let her convince you that what you’re doing is right, that the children you sponsor will be happy to see you again, that you’re just a college student for goodness sake, that you need to cut yourself a break.
Three and a half years earlier, it is late April and you are eighteen years old, a senior in high school, eating a snack with the children you nanny when you receive a phone call informing you that you have not been selected as a finalist for the ten-month-long exchange program in South Korea that you had planned to do as a gap year. You are shocked. You thought that as a 4.0 student with experience living in Australia and Italy, you would’ve been a shoe-in. You have no idea what you will do next year because you are not ready for college. You were so sure you’d be accepted to the exchange program that you already deferred your college acceptance. You go home and stay up all night messaging friends in Italy, Germany, Denmark, and family in Japan; Google-searching volunteer programs and making spreadsheets. You call your boss at the grocery store where you work on the weekends and ask to pick up extra shifts. When you factor in your anticipated graduation party money, you think that you’ll be able to save enough to take an independent gap year around the world.
You find a website called “International Volunteer Headquarters,” which advertises itself as offering the world’s best range of affordable programs. You think it’s a bit odd that you have to pay to volunteer, but you read that your fees go towards room, board, transportation and orientation, which seems to make sense. You click on the Ghana page and watch the promotional video. A man cuts open a fresh coconut, Ghanaian children run up to hug the legs of Western volunteers and music reminiscent of The Lion King plays in the background. “You come here and see how many things need to be fixed and you think you can’t do that, you can’t change anything,” a blonde American woman says to the camera. “But just being here, being integrated, connecting to the kids and the culture makes all the difference to the people that live here.” The video ends on a poster that reads, “bridging the gaps between rich and poor.”
You want to get away from Western civilization and experience the “simple life” advertised in the video. You’ve fantasized Africa as being an agrarian utopia ever since you were a kid who dreamt of doing the Peace Corps. You imagine that living in a dirt-floored hut with no electricity or running water will force you to grow in ways that your cookie-cutter American consumer life never would. You think missionary programs are problematic because the ulterior motive is conversion, but you think it’s noble to spend your time teaching and caring for Ghanaian orphans. You are oblivious to how programs like the IVHQ could possibly be perceived as neocolonialist. You click on the “Apply Now” button and budget two months of your gap year to childcare in Ghana.
You are a freshman in college, about a year since your first trip to Dodowa, and you and your friends are munching on baked oysters and downing pitchers of bottomless mimosas at an“uptempo eatery” in your college town of Oxford, Mississippi. You are all trying to drink as much as you can before the bottomless special ends at noon. At around 11:45, your boyfriend asks the server to go ahead and bring out two more pitchers for the table.
You were the one who organized the whole shindig, and invited your new college boyfriend, Drew, his older brother, John, and your friend, Evelyn. You can tell Evelyn thinks John is cute, because she’s playing with her hair. The conversation flows as you all drink more and accidentally slosh orange juice on the black tablecloth.
“So, what’s your major again, Evelyn?” John asks and rocks his chair back.
“International studies and French,” Evelyn takes a sip from your glass. Evelyn is only eighteen and doesn’t have a fake ID yet. But she seemed much older because she is so cosmopolitan—her parents are South African, she was born in the UK, had lived in New York City and Sydney, and is a National Merit Scholar.
“Any idea what you wanna do with international studies after you graduate?” John runs his fingers through his brown mop, which he is growing out for a man-bun.
“I’d like to work in development,” Evelyn says in her posh British-Australian accent. “I think I want to get a master’s degree in economics and assist underprivileged countries in developing their own economic models and infrastructure.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit paternalistic?” John leans back.
“No, not at all—it’s paternalistic to go to another country and implement programs and policies without consulting and collaborating with the residents,” Evelyn says. “But I think you’re right that many non-profits, like short-term volunteer-tourism, do run the risk of being paternalistic and neocolonialist.”
“Yeah, for sure,” John’s voice is nonchalant, like it is obvious.
“You guys know I volunteered at an orphanage in Ghana, right?” you pipe up. “And I feel like I actually made a difference.”
“Hmm, really, how so?” Evelyn uses her kindly politician tone.
“I taught a first-grade class how to read and do addition and subtraction.” You take a gulp of mimosa. “And now I sponsor two children.”
“How long were you there?” John asks. He reclines in his chair. You are surprised he hasn’t fallen over yet.
“Two months,” you say.
“Sounds like a vacation,” John says. He is from Alabama but talks like a Cali surfer.
“No, it wasn’t a vacation. It was a full-time job that didn’t pay,” you say. “There were definitely volunteers there who treated it like a vacation and just lazed around posting photos all day, but there were also volunteers with the right intentions who worked their asses off.”
“Mmm, I don’t know,” Evelyn says. “The whole concept of volunteer-tourism positions countries like Ghana as helpless. You know my parents are from South Africa and they can’t stand when people assume that the whole continent of Africa is just a degraded wasteland of poverty.”
“Yeah, exactly,” John finally sits up straight. “It’s totally so neocolonialist to assume that African people can’t help themselves.”
Drew looks at you and shakes his head in disagreement.
“But, Evelyn,” you say. “Have you ever been to South Africa?”
“I visited once for a week or so when I was a child, but I don’t really remember much.”
“John, have you ever been to Ghana?” you ask.
“Uh, no.”
“Then how can you guys critique something when you have no personal experience with it? If you’ve never been to Ghana, how do you know that they don’t need help? When I arrived at the orphanage, the first-grade class had no teacher whatsoever—just an eighteen-year-old girl who played on her phone and beat the kids with a stick when they got up from their seats. And yeah, two months isn’t a long time to leave a lasting impact, but by the end, my students could read simple sentences and subtract triple digit numbers!” You drink the rest of your mimosa.
Your boyfriend holds your hand under the table.
“Hey,” Drew finally pipes up. “I bet Jacqueline made those kids really happy, and at least she did something—something is better than nothing.”
“Eh, I don’t know about that,” Evelyn chuckles.
“Well, what have you done to help the under privileged?” Drew asks.
“Well, not much yet . . .” Evelyn says.
~ ~ ~
It is a dry August morning in Dodowa and you wake, in the same volunteer house where you stayed when you were nineteen, to the crowing of the roosters. You stretch in your foam mattress and are glad that you listened your mom and decided to come back to Potter’s Village for a month before your senior year of college.
Auntie Kay, a Ghanaian woman who’s been working at Potter’s since it was founded in 2004, has prepared the table with bread and jam, fruit, tea and coffee. You and the other volunteers—a 32-year-old filmmaker from Los Angeles named Skye and a friend group of six Spaniards from Barcelona—sit down to eat. After you finish eating, you all wash your dishes in two buckets outside, gather your things and walk the two kilometers through the market and forest to Potter’s.
When you arrive at Potter’s Village’s large, new compound, six-year-old Benjamin, who has Down syndrome and doesn’t speak, is running around completely naked under the hot sun, rubbing dirt on his crotch and throwing rocks at toddlers Isaac and Frank who are shoeless and crying. Frank is naked from the waist down and Isaac has an overflowing diaper that probably hasn’t been changed since the evening before when you changed it. Meanwhile, the other 130 children at Potter’s are either finishing up their breakfasts of watery porridge or dragging desks in rows under the pavilion for summer classes. Since there are no teachers, some teenagers are getting their lesson plans together while teen girls wash the dishes from breakfast. The last time you were here, it was much more cramped, but there had been caregivers—Ghanaian women referred to as ‘mothers’ who watched the little ones while the other children went to school and did chores. But recently, Mama Grace had stopped paying the mothers so most of them had quit. You wonder if Mama Grace quit paying the mothers because she had a free source of volunteer caregivers.
Last time you were here, your main responsibility had been to teach first grade. Potter’s Village had started their own school because the kids were being bullied at the local public school for being orphans. Your “classroom” had been in the front hallway, so your students were always running outside whenever they didn’t want to listen. You made a rewards chart and bribed the kids with cookies. There also hadn’t been any textbooks or workbooks, so you made worksheets, scribbling subtraction problems onto notebook pages.
You pick up diaper-less Frank and sling him around your waist. Skye holds Isaac’s hand and you all walk to the boys’ dorm in search of pants. A few guys kick a soccer ball around outside the dorm, which houses around eighty boys aged two to twenty-four. Technically, each older boy and girl had been assigned a younger child to “look after,” meaning make sure she or he is clothed, fed and bathed, but the older boys are seriously slacking. Whenever you ask them for a diaper or pants for Jude and Joe, they say, “uh, I don’t know” and walk away, or claim there are none left, but then you root around a cabinet, or ask a few more boys, and eventually find a stray clean diaper. Volunteers had complained to Mama Grace about this chaos and neglect and she responded, “If you see a child crying, or without shoes or clothes, don’t point your finger at me, go and do something about it! That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” You listen to Mama Grace and eventually buy wipes and diapers and keep them in your backpack. Once, while you’re changing Isaac’s diaper outside on the concrete ledge around the boys’ dorm, a nearby Spanish volunteer says, “Woah, you bought those yourself?” You nod. He raises his eyebrows, “Wow, you’re a dedicated volunteer!” You nod and proceed to lift Isaac’s legs so you can wipe. There are white pus-filled lesions all over his rear.
After your lunch of waakye—a Ghanaian cooked rice and bean dish—you continue chipping away at the stack of research articles you had printed off in the U.S. You sip on a mug of milky English breakfast tea while you read an article about the critique of the “Barbie Savior,” which describes an unwitting young woman, usually white and Western, who takes performative selfies with black or brown babies in order to boost her social media presence. “Two words, one love,” the bio on the satiric Instagram page reads. “Dear child,” reads the caption below an image of a Barbie holding a black baby doll. “One of the happiest moments in your life was definitely when you met me, but I am sorry to tell you that there is a very small chance we are ever going to meet again.”
The article you’re reading argues that by pointing to the individual female volunteer as the primary offender, the Barbie Savior critique fails to account for the broader political and historical contexts of the volunteer tourism industry. “Popular critiques of the industry would benefit from a more historicized, multi-scalar and place-based analysis of the particularities of the volunteer tourism experience,” the article argues, meaning it is more productive to understand how voluntourism functions as a structural system rather than pointing fingers at just one player in the system. We need to look critically at all the forces at play—volunteer agencies, NGOs, governmental departments, local economies—and understand the nuances of each voluntourist experience. This article resonates with you and eases your guilt. You think you’re not fully responsible for all the problems in the orphanage volunteerism industry. You also feel redeemed because you’ve been taking ethnographic notes and plan on writing about your particular experience, which will provide a place-based analysis and contribute to the growing body of research on voluntourism.
The article makes you think about how the system is designed to keep voluntourists in the dark, to hide the truth behind glossy advertisements, orientations and handbooks, so you do not fully understand what’s going on backstage or how you’re affecting the host community and country. You did not want to be a part of a Western-run organization because you thought that would be neocolonialist and paternalistic of you to think you knew better than the local people. But since agencies, like IVHQ, place volunteers directly with local organizations, you felt confident and assured. You assumed that working for a Ghanaian-run orphanage was not problematic. You assumed that you should trust Mama Grace because as a Ghanaian woman, she understands the needs of her country and community better than you ever could.
Later, you discover scholars who contend that voluntourism isn’t all bad. One scholar argues that the desire of young people to act upon the world shouldn’t be condemned but encouraged. And anthropologist Andrea Freidus writes that in an increasingly violent and xenophobic world, cross-cultural engagements can help people understand and appreciate each other. You wholeheartedly agree. “If volunteers can understand the people they work with as citizens with rights rather than objects of charity,” Freidus writes, “they can begin to think about long-term partnership, justice and structural change.”
That evening, you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Maxwell, one of the children you sponsor, atop a cinderblock foundation reading Jack and the Beanstalk as dusk falls over the banana trees. You’re still breathing a little heavy after playing a game of capture-the-flag. No one actually had a flag, so the Spanish volunteers improvised with a sweat-stained T-shirt. Maxwell had been so fast, he’d do a little jig while he waited for his competitor at the “flag,” squiggling his arms around and smirking, before snatching the shirt, running back to home base and high fiving his teammate. You are happy to see Maxwell’s athleticism and smile because the last time you were here, he hadn’t had many friends, avoided sports and seemed to mostly cling to the walls of the orphanage courtyard. He also hadn’t been able to read and only passed his classes because he could copy the sentences that his teacher scratched on the broken chalkboard into his notebook. Like many children in institutional care in Ghana, Maxwell was behind the national standard. Studies show that while orphanages may provide higher-quality food, they ultimately have lasting negative effects on children’s psychological development because most caregivers focus on physical health and don’t have time to prioritize play, socialization or education. One study found that incorporating 90-minute sessions of daily play improved institutionalized children’s motor skills, cognitive and social functioning. “Orphanage caregivers could serve as important motivators for orphans’ educational goals,” another study concludes, which inspires you and makes you think that you’re not a Barbie Savior, you’re different and what you’re doing actually matters.
“Using the leaves and twisty v—-,” Maxwell pauses and looks at you.
“Sound it out,” you say and place your finger under the word. “Vvee-iiiye-nn-ss.”
“Vines,” Maxwell says and continues, “vines like rungs of a lad…der, Jack climbed and climbed until at last, he reached the sky.”
“Great job, Maxwell!” you say. “I am so proud of you! Give me a high-five!”
He high-fives you quickly, bashfully, probably because he is becoming a teenager, thus, too cool for your dorky excitement. He turns the page.
“Jack ran up the road toward the castle…” Maxwell continues reading, pausing occasionally to sound out words with you until he finishes the story, “and they lived happily ever after.”
“Maxwell!” you gush. “That was AMAZING! Do you remember last time I was here—I read the entire book to you and this time, you read the entire book to me!”
He smiles and nods his head stoically. You can’t believe how grown-up he’s become. His high cheekbones are defined, his eyebrows thick and he’s grown taller than you. You remember when he was ten and used to tap your shoulder and hide when you turned around. You used to bring him the daily iron tablet the doctor had prescribed for his spoon nails and help him with his homework. You would go on well-intentioned rants about how reading could open up a whole new world for him and it’d be a skill he’d cherish for the rest of his life. He had always seemed to zone out, but now, you wonder if maybe he had been listening all along. Maxwell had recently been honored at the schoolyear commencement ceremony for having the third best exam grades in his class. When the teacher handed Maxwell his certificate, you crouched in front and snapped a photo. You were glad you could perform the role of the excited relative for Maxwell.
“When will we learn together again?” Maxwell asks as you close Jack and the Beanstalk.
“Tomorrow afternoon, after your summer classes get out,” you say and put the storybook in your backpack. “I made some multiplication flashcards, so we can do those!”
You high-five Maxwell again, give him a hug goodnight and go look for Skye. Maxwell walks to the boys’ dormitory in his purple foam flip-flops caked in clay dust. The flip-flops are a few sizes too big, so they slid off his feet. In the dorm, the boys are probably crowded around a desk playing FIFA or watching a movie. Potter’s Village had recently bought the boys a small flat screen and PlayStation 2 so that they’d stay inside before bedtime and wouldn’t be running around outside in the dirt field getting bit by mosquitos. The mosquitos are especially bad here because the orphanage is adjacent to the upscale Forest Hotel that has an outdoor swimming pool from which the owner empties dirty chlorinated water onto the Potter’s property, creating small green algae-filled marshes—the ideal breeding ground for malaria mosquitos. Mama Grace made the children write letters to the owner. Dear neighbor, by the grace of God we ask you to please stop dumping your pool water on our site. Thank you. God bless you.
Skye sits on the white-tiled porch of the girls’ dorm, holding perpetually wide-eyed and quiet eight-month-old Ishmael, whose head has outgrown his malnourished newborn-sized body. Skye bobs Ishmael up and down on her lap, while a little girl named Charity plays Candy Crush on Skye’s iPhone.
“Hey, Skye, are you ready to go back?” you ask.
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “Just give me one sec—I’ll bring baby Ishmael back inside.”
While you wait for Skye, you look at the girls’ dorm, which houses about fifty girls aged three to twenty-four and is much smaller than the boys’ dorm. Girls have to double and even triple-up on mattresses, and still, some sleep on the floor. This is only meant to be temporary until Potter’s can raise enough donation money to continue building the new girls’ dorm atop the cinderblock foundations you and Maxwell had been sitting on earlier. The temporary girls’ dorm is actually meant to be the ‘medical center’ and dormitory for the Italian volunteers who financed the building’s construction.
Skye comes back and it’s already 7:15 and dark outside. Technically, according to the volunteer handbook, you’re supposed to leave Potter’s by 6:30 at the latest, so the children have time to settle down before bed at 8, but no one really follows that rule. You and Skye walk past the pavilion, where the kids go to school, eat their meals and play. You walk past the new two-story administrative office, which is developing quickly. In just the two weeks since you’ve been in Dodowa, the construction workers finished building the entire second floor.
Skye walks in front of you on the narrow dirt path through a residential area of Dodowa. You pass a small mud house with a roof made of rusty tin-sheets held down by pieces of wood. Buckets and half-filled bottles of cooking oil litter the orange clay yard. A woman sits outside on a stool, stoking a flame with twigs. Like usual, children run toward you, wave and say, ‘obroni, good evening.’ Sickly kittens trail behind the children and bedsheets, socks and shirts hang from a nearby clothesline. As you continue on the path, you wonder if this village mother can afford to send her kids to school, feed them?
Stray chickens cluck and pick at the empty black plastic baggies and Fan Milk wrappers strewn across the grass, and straggly goats cry as they chase each other around crumbling cinderblock. Many structures and houses along this path seemed to be empty, abandoned or only half-finished, which reminds you of Mama Grace’s big dreams for “The Kingdom of Potter’s Village.” The day before, Mama Grace had called a volunteer meeting and bellowed about how one day, the Kingdom would have an in-ground swimming pool, guesthouses for volunteers’ families, classrooms for each grade, a soccer field, ping-pong table and everything painted in vibrant blues. “All we need is for you—our volunteers, our angels—to help us raise the money,” she smiled, her chunky necklace glittering in the sun. But currently, Potter’s Village could barely afford fruit, vegetables and meat to feed all the kids, and was struggling not to get shut down by the Department of Social Welfare.
“So, how’d it go talking to Mama Grace this afternoon?” you ask Skye. “Did you give her your donation money?”
“Yeah . . .” Skye says as you walk by people packing and locking up their market stalls for the night. “Mama Grace is going to use the $1,000 I fundraised to tile the office.”
“Oh . . .” you say. “Not to work on the new girls’ dorm?”
“Yeah,” Skye sighs. “I’m not too happy about it either. I don’t know how all the people who donated are going to react to hearing that their money’s being used for tiles. I love Mama Grace, but she doesn’t always do the best job prioritizing and it’s so hard to talk to her . . . I don’t want to come off as being disrespectful or culturally insensitive, you know?”
“Yeah,” you say. “I think Mama Grace just assumes more donation money will always be flowing in, so there’s no need to prioritize.”
Later that night, you sit on a stool in the closet-sized kitchen and talk to Auntie Kay while she fries noodles for you and the other volunteers’ dinner.
“I got another one for you—July 27th,” Auntie Kay says. She pauses from chopping carrots and smirks mischievously. “Look it up—I’m curious.”
You pick up your iPhone and search Astrology-Zodiac-Signs.com.
“So, whose birthday is it?” you ask as the webpage loads.
“Mama Grace,” she replies, and tosses some chopped onions into the skillet on the hotplate.
“Well, Mama Grace is a Leo,” you say. “Her animal is tiger and her strengths are creativity, passion, generosity and cheerfulness.”
“Mmmhmm,” Auntie Kay nods. “It’s true—Mama Grace is generous and creative. What about the weaknesses?”
“Arrogant, stubborn, self-centered…”
“Mmmhmm,” Auntie Kay laughs. “It’s also true.”
“…lazy and inflexible,” you finish.
“Hmm, it’s all true except for lazy,” Auntie Kay says as she dices a tomato. “Mama Grace is not lazy, but, oh, she is stubborn!”
You laugh and nod reluctantly. You agree with Auntie Kay but are unsure if it is your place to poke fun at the matriarch of Potter’s Village. Mama Grace has published many books in Ghana, one of which you discovered on the bookshelf in the volunteer house. From the worn back cover of “Women in Development,” published in 1996, you learn that Mama Grace has roots in the royal family of Anomabo, is interested in the advocacy of women and studied French in Saint-Étienne. She also served as an Official Delegate from Ghana at the United Nations Conference on the Commission of the Status of Women in 2002, which makes you feel guilty and paternalistic for questioning her ethics. You sometimes wonder if Mama Grace is pocketing donation money, but you always squash that supposition because it’s neocolonialist and very white savior of you to doubt someone who has been running an orphanage for fifteen years.
Whenever Mama Grace arrives at the orphanage, in a taxi with an entourage, everyone accommodates her like royalty—rushing to wipe dust from a chair, getting her water and fanning her face with cardboard. Traditional Ghanaian customs requires one to deeply respect and never question their elders, but you’ve become skeptical that this is the best approach to running a nonprofit organization. You feel guilty for your skepticism.
“Mama Grace was so stubborn today,” Auntie Kay shakes her head and tsk, tsk, tsks her tongue. “Oh, she made me so angry!”
“Really?” you say. “What happened?”
“I told Mama Grace I would leave if she didn’t start paying me, I’ve been saying so for years now and she always says she’ll pay me soon, and that I get to stay in the volunteer house, but it’s not enough for me anymore! I work so hard, oh! I take care of the volunteer house and I’m up at Potter’s every day waiting on Mama Grace, and I go to the market to buy vegetables for the children. And Mama Grace said she wants me to start supervising the Potter’s dorms at night, to walk around and make sure everyone is sleeping in their own beds because we can’t have any more girls getting pregnant.”
Auntie Kay pauses from cooking, puts her palms together, raises her eyebrows and looks hard into your eyes.
“I tell her, Eh, Mamee, let me understand, you expect me to walk up and down from the volunteer house to Potter’s all day—cooking, cleaning, taking care of children, doing anything you ask of me, and then, you expect me to stay up all night too? And you don’t even pay me! It’s not right,” Auntie Kay shakes her head and goes back to chopping cabbage. “It’s not right.”
“Oh, I’m sorry Auntie Kay,” you say. “That’s not right at all. It’s not fair. You work so hard; you deserve to rest and get paid!”
“Uhh huhh,” Auntie Kay seethes. Steam rises as she flips the vegetables in the skillet.
“Hey, Auntie Kay,” you ask. “Whatever happened to that bakery that Amelia founded?”
Last time you were here, Amelia Griffiths was the poster volunteer who had been crowned by Mama Grace as “the Queen of Potter’s” for her fundraising. Amelia had raised enough money to open a small bakery in order to provide Potter’s with a source of selfgenerating, sustainable income. Amelia didn’t want Potter’s to continue to rely 100% on donations and thought the bakery could provide the high school grads at Potter’s with jobs. And any leftover, unsold bread could be used to feed Potter’s children. You thought it was a great idea and danced merrily at the grand opening.
“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Auntie Kay says. “It’s done, closed. Mama Grace couldn’t trust anyone to work there. She always thought the teenagers were pocketing money and purposefully miscounting the day’s profits. And I would tell her, ‘oh, Ma, you have to trust others! You can’t control everything! And these are the children you’ve helped raise—why would they steal from you?’ But oh, she didn’t listen to me. That Mama Grace never listens to anyone.”
~ ~ ~
You are a senior in college sitting at your Ikea desk in your room discovering more and more documents and studies that make you think Potter’s Village is severely corrupt and problematic. You learn that as of 2014, there were 148 institutions for orphans and vulnerable children in Ghana, only five of which were actually registered. Many of these unregistered orphanages are being shut down because they do not meet the requirements of the Department of Social Welfare. You find the checklist that social workers are meant to use when inspecting orphanages and you don’t think Potter’s should’ve passed. With 130 children and only a few permanent caregivers, Potter’s doesn’t meet the caregiver to children ratio. Each child does not have her own bed with a mosquito net. Each child does not have her own bag for clothes and belongings. Potter’s is not fully fenced-in with a gate and lock. The Potter’s promotional website certainly does have photographs of the children used for fundraising purposes. And Potter’s fundraising strategy includes individual donations for children. There is no criminal record check for Potter’s volunteers and none of the volunteers have approval letters from the Department of Social Welfare.
You pick at your cuticles as you find more and more proof that that your presence has tangible negative effects on the children you’re meant to be serving. You read a study which found that children raised in orphanages have immense difficulty finding employment as adults because they’ve lived a life isolated from their own society and thus, have no support networks. The Ghanaian author of the study writes that orphanages alienate young people from their extended families and communities, which are at the heart of the African way of life. “Even my biological mum can’t stand me,” said one of the participants in the study, a young woman in her twenties. “In the children’s home we had our own culture and were brought up very European. I have white values in me. I see things from a different perspective. So, we are always clashing.” You think about all the high school grads at Potter’s, in their twenties, who continue hanging around, unable to find work and live independently. You read that other participants in the study were stigmatized for being orphans and you think of Abigail, an eighteen-year-old girl at Potter’s, who failed out of senior school. She said it wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t have school supplies and that the teachers had treated her unfairly since she came from an orphanage.
You read another study about children in orphanages who have been reunited with their families. Upon re-entry to a Ghanaian public school, one participant had trouble because in the orphanage, he had been preparing for the SAT and was used to “living like he was in America,” which makes you think of all the western fairytales you’ve read to the children. The study also found that children who were reunited with their families returned to the same issues, such as alcoholism and poverty, that caused them to leave initially. The study concluded that more support is needed to assist families during the reunification process, but one participant reports, “unfortunately the donors made us aware that they will only support the children if they are in the orphanage.”
You read that unlicensed orphanages popped up around Ghana to cater to the influx of voluntourists. “Over the past decade, Ghana has been invaded,” a journalist writes in Ghana’s Daily Graphic. “This invasion has not come in the form of killer bees or illegal miners. No; over the past decade, Ghana has been invaded by voluntourists.” A Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF Ghana writes that despite the good intentions of some volunteers, their presence is often exploited by proprietors who go on “recruitment drives” of children, telling parents that the white man and woman have come to help the children. You read that less than 30 percent of donated money to orphanages actually goes to childcare and that the Ghanaian government’s Care Reform Initiative has made provisions to safeguard against harmful ‘volunteerism.’
You read that NGOs in Ghana are required to have a minimum of two directors, and you find that technically, according to the Potter’s website, a man named Alex Asamoah serves as the Vice President, but you’ve never seen or heard of him before and as far as you can tell Mama Grace wields all the power. You realize that Western volunteers and donors, like you, are the ones fueling neglectful and exploitative orphanages because without you, Mama Grace would have no source of revenue. People like Mama Grace are structuring orphanages as profit-making ventures to attract unwitting foreign tourists who supply donations and labor for free. You think you’ve known this all along but didn’t want to believe it.
You wanted, so badly, to believe in the narrative of cross-cultural exchange. You did exactly what the scholars argued you shouldn’t do—you thought of Potter’s Village as an isolated entity, separate from the trends in the rest of the country. You thought that the way youdid volunteer-tourism, with a focus on education and literacy, was okay and left a positive impact, not like other volunteers, such as the Spanish family who wore white billowy clothes and forced the kids to sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” every day while they took endless videos. You thought you were different.
But the fact of the matter is, if voluntourists didn’t volunteer and donate, corrupt people wouldn’t open unlicensed orphanages. Auntie Emma wouldn’t be able to exploit children for donations that she’d sell at the market. Mama Grace wouldn’t be able to use donation money to build a two-story, tiled office building while girls sleep on the floor and Auntie Kay goes unpaid. You thought that as long as you worked hard, respected everyone and increased literacy rates, you were being helpful. But the truth is, no matter what you did, you were still supporting an industry that preys on the naivety of young do-gooders in order to unnecessarily isolate children from their families and culture.
You wish this weren’t the essay you were writing. You wanted to write a story of hope, community, mentorship and cultural exchange. You wanted to write about your connections with Maxwell and Auntie Kay but now you you’re writing about all the harm you’ve caused Maxwell and Auntie Kay. You didn’t want to portray yourself as the clueless Barbie Savior and you didn’t want to portray Mama Grace as the corrupt ringleader, but that’s exactly what you’re doing.
You show up to Potter’s Village one afternoon in August 2019 to discover that Maxwell is leaving the orphanage. A woman is at a table under the pavilion signing paperwork with Mama Grace’s daughter, Martha. Nearby, Maxwell is slumped in a blue plastic chair, with a tote bag full of his belongings on the ground next to him. You run over to the pavilion.
“Maxwell, are you leaving? Why didn’t you tell me?” You try to catch his eye, but he only stares at the ground. He wears loose brown pants and a rumpled polo.
“Maxwell, are you going on vacation? Is this all your stuff?” He refuses to look you in the eye.
“Are you excited to go home and see your family?”
Martha introduces you to a kind-looking woman in a black V-neck and skinny jeans. You learn she is Maxwell’s mom. But Maxwell never spoke of his mom. You didn’t think he had a mom because Mama Grace told you he was an orphan. Maxwell’s story is like all the others, you remember Mama Grace saying flippantly when you decided to sponsor him. His parents abandoned him, and you know the rest. You wonder if you ever really mattered to Maxwell, or did he just Facetime call you because he was bored? Does his mom know you’re his sponsor? Did she use her son to profit off you? She doesn’t look poor or ill, she looks healthy and happy. You feel guilty for judging Maxwell’s mom from only her appearance. You don’t know her— she could be struggling.
“Maxwell is just going on summer vacation,” Martha tells you. “He’ll be back in September when the new semester resumes.”
“Oh . . .” you say. “Well, I’m leaving at the end of August, so I probably won’t see him again.”
“Oh,” Martha says.
“Is it okay if I give him a hug good-bye?” you look at Maxwell’s mom.
“Of course,” she smiles.
You hug him and tell him you’ll miss him, then you watch him walk down the dirt road with his mom. You think of all the memories—frisbee, charades, soccer—that you won’t make with Maxwell anymore. Later that day, you ask Mama Grace if you could visit Maxwell at his family home, she smiles and says, of course, but then, a few days later she tells you that no one can find the scrap of paper on which the administration had written Maxwell’s address. You return to the U.S. to finish your last year of college. Eventually another volunteer tells you that Maxwell has permanently returned to his family home. You doubt you will ever hear from him again. You wonder if he received the letter you wrote him and the giftbag full of books that you asked Potter’s to send him. You imagine him at home, eating banku with his mom and sharing jokes in the local dialect, Twi. You wonder if Maxwell will remember you and you feel guilty for caring.