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Gap-year students are just misery tourists mixing with The Poor because it looks good on Facebook
By Tanya Gold
The Guardian
The number of teenagers taking gap years has shrunk, like a wildebeest's watering-hole in a drought. It's the credit crunch, growing more silvery linings by the day. And this pleases me. I don't like to see posh teenagers doing misery tourism and returning with batik trousers and malaria. (Because they are too stupid to take malaria pills and wear non-batik trousers.)
Affluent European adolescents used to do the Grand Tour. They went to Italy to admire the art. Now they go to Africa to admire the shit. Gap years are moral imperialism. It's a year-long narcissism party, where the gap-yearers use Africans and South Americans and Indians as props in the movie of their own wonderfulness. They want to have a "caring experience". So they invade slums and orphanages and shanty towns. They turn up with teeth like brand-new fridges and shout, "Let's build a waterslide, guys!" Then they disappear back to Oxford or Exeter or the LSE. It's rare that they do anything useful.
Developing countries have labour already. They don't need ours. The carbon cost of flying 200,000 British adolescents long-haul each year will one day put the mud huts they build under water. Many charities privately admit they are a waste of space.
And doesn't the developing world have enough to grieve it without Cambridge University students poncing around looking caring, having Jesus Christ moments, before buggering back home to spend a lifetime exploiting it? "Look," the gap-yearers go, eyeballs spinning, "The Poor. We must help The Poor by building them a mud hut they could have built themselves and giving them a Kit-Kat." Cue photograph of gap-yearer helping Poor, to illustrate good qualities on Facebook page.
How do I know this? Read the websites for gap-year students commenting on their disappointing experiences. They clog up the internet with their whining.
"No one met me at the airport!" they squeal, shivering back in Epsom, or Guildford, or Penge, texting each other on their mobile telephones made of Congolese minerals and blood. "There was no breakfast! Strange things came out my arse!"
They seemed to have confused their gap year with staying at the Marriott Hotel - Slum and Shanty Branch, Dumpsville. They thought their experience of helping The Poor would be better. More fun. More Club 18-30, less Club I Died By the Age of Five Because There Isn't Any Medicine Here, You Fool. They don't seem to realise that The Poor live in squalor because they are - well - poor. While the economy melts around their ears, the Dolce e Gabbana missionaries will be staying at home this year.
By Tanya Gold
The Guardian
The number of teenagers taking gap years has shrunk, like a wildebeest's watering-hole in a drought. It's the credit crunch, growing more silvery linings by the day. And this pleases me. I don't like to see posh teenagers doing misery tourism and returning with batik trousers and malaria. (Because they are too stupid to take malaria pills and wear non-batik trousers.)
Affluent European adolescents used to do the Grand Tour. They went to Italy to admire the art. Now they go to Africa to admire the shit. Gap years are moral imperialism. It's a year-long narcissism party, where the gap-yearers use Africans and South Americans and Indians as props in the movie of their own wonderfulness. They want to have a "caring experience". So they invade slums and orphanages and shanty towns. They turn up with teeth like brand-new fridges and shout, "Let's build a waterslide, guys!" Then they disappear back to Oxford or Exeter or the LSE. It's rare that they do anything useful.
Developing countries have labour already. They don't need ours. The carbon cost of flying 200,000 British adolescents long-haul each year will one day put the mud huts they build under water. Many charities privately admit they are a waste of space.
And doesn't the developing world have enough to grieve it without Cambridge University students poncing around looking caring, having Jesus Christ moments, before buggering back home to spend a lifetime exploiting it? "Look," the gap-yearers go, eyeballs spinning, "The Poor. We must help The Poor by building them a mud hut they could have built themselves and giving them a Kit-Kat." Cue photograph of gap-yearer helping Poor, to illustrate good qualities on Facebook page.
How do I know this? Read the websites for gap-year students commenting on their disappointing experiences. They clog up the internet with their whining.
"No one met me at the airport!" they squeal, shivering back in Epsom, or Guildford, or Penge, texting each other on their mobile telephones made of Congolese minerals and blood. "There was no breakfast! Strange things came out my arse!"
They seemed to have confused their gap year with staying at the Marriott Hotel - Slum and Shanty Branch, Dumpsville. They thought their experience of helping The Poor would be better. More fun. More Club 18-30, less Club I Died By the Age of Five Because There Isn't Any Medicine Here, You Fool. They don't seem to realise that The Poor live in squalor because they are - well - poor. While the economy melts around their ears, the Dolce e Gabbana missionaries will be staying at home this year.
