Negligence hurts more than cruelty. Stupidity hurts more than indifference.

                  Nowadays, many students are involved in community service or volunteer projects related to the conservation of the environment. So today I brought up a topic that all of us, as environmental volunteers of some sort, should be thinking about. What is it that makes my activity a volunteer work and not simply ?financial aid? or ?meddling with their daily lives?? Volunteers often say that it is the heart that is different. They wanted to help others with the kindest and purest hearts. However, ironically, as that pureness and kindness grow, as more and more people start to emphasize with our story, the hearts that we all started with gets tainted and distorted, either we like it or not, either we expected it or not.

             If you have ever visited the official websites of World vision, KFHI, UNICEF, Good Neighbors, and Red Cross, though they all have different mottos which are expressed into distinct ways of volunteering, they all share one commonality. They all have similar pictures. You look at the pictures. And all you see are smiles. You can see comparatively well-dressed people handing on gifts. Everyone is all jolly. The one giving the gift seems very proud of what they are doing. At the same time, we can see gratitude in the faces of the ones receiving the gift. Both are very busy thanking each other. Volunteers are thankful that they were provided with a precious lesson. The volunteered are thankful for receiving the aid they really needed.

         We, as in my volunteer team also always took pictures. Photographs were mandatory. They were so important that we could even do a U-turn if we left the camera back in the hotel before heading to the place where it was planned for us to volunteer. But at this point, we must ask ourselves why. Why were we so enthusiastic to leave pictures? Now here comes the irony of volunteering.

             Of course, pictures might be used to remember that moment. The moment I met a girl after a full year, yes I couldn?t help but take out my camera. Yes, I admit that I had to leave that moment into record. But this is not the case for all.

             Volunteering organizations that I mentioned before like World vision, KFHI, UNICEF, Good Neighbors, and Red Cross are one of world?s and Korea?s biggest volunteering organizations. Their websites are filled with kids smiling after wearing a new pair of shoes, laughing after getting a tray full of warm food, and boasting the new toys that the organizations provided for them. Those websites are probably using this to say, ?Thanks to your support, look what we were able to do!? Or maybe the other way around. By posting pictures of a young, emaciated child dropping few teardrops hopelessly, or a young boy carrying a bottle and walking barefoot to the nearest pond, those websites are intending to touch upon one of the humans? most fundamental emotions; pity. But I am pretty sure the photographers employed by those organizations did not want to do all of that. Those images that we often call as ?intended, artificial, or fake photographs? taken by them must be very different from what they really wanted to hold inside their lenses. I am pretty sure they didn?t want to do it. They didn?t want to stick their big camera lenses to the poor kids? faces and make them smile or cry. But they also had no option. Without such pictures to go on the website, funding will become more difficult, and that will trigger a vicious cycle where providing aid for similar people in future programs will become harder.

             So to help those who are incapable to move freely and can?t understand our language, ironically, we had to request them to do this and that. The first few times it was ok, mainly because I thought it was going to end soon. But this repeated every day and night for two years, for two full volunteering sessions and I started to feel this anger towards myself. I was upset at the reason why I had to be ordering things to them if I really started this with a kind heart in the first place. Then, I was upset with myself for being upset.

             But as much as I feel the importance and value of volunteering, I also know the importance of funding too well that I know by heart that if I can?t get these pictures this year to post on the website and send to people who are willing to support, I won?t be able to come again next year. But what was all of this about? Making these people of this year uncomfortable to help people next year in a project that might not even come together? Then what is the whole point of doing this?            

             Is there even a way we can correct this? Well, my answer is yes. First, we have to throw away our stupidity. We have to be done with all the extreme ignorance and negligence that disables us to realize their pain unless we are provided with shocking photographs. With a little bit of interest to the lives of those people, we can easily empathize with them and imagine how hard it will be to live under such conditions. We must continue to throw away our negligence so that we no longer need youtube videos of young kids with legs skinny as chopsticks staggering due to the lack of clean water and food, or photographs of a family smiling their biggest smiles after receiving something that only costs a few dollars to feel their anger, sadness, feeling of unfairness, and sometimes their smallest happiness. To help them stop posing in front of those monstrous camera lenses, and to help them enjoy the moment a little bit more by caring less about how to smile or cry in front all those devices, we must continue to become more sensitive about this. We must all prove that us teenagers are not that stupid or ignorant to require such fake photographs to get this feeling that we want to help them. I know we are smarter than that. This is what I have felt for the last 2 years spending every summer vacation in Laos. We must remember that it is nothing more than routinized negligence that hurts.