It pains me that this was my answer, because it’s not true. It was a cute, snappy answer to a question that was, I felt at the time, too big to answer. I didn’t realize the implications of my words as I said them, but I see now that they reek of “voluntourism.”

It is true that it has been a dream of mine to see Angkor Wat since I heard of it’s existence from my traveling companions in India while visiting ancient cultural sites there. I was drawn to Angkor Wat because of its rich religious history. But it stuck my imagination because the jungle is retaking the area, growing around and over and even through the ruins. As it turned out, Pathfinders provided me an opportunity to visit the temples within a few weeks abroad, since our first project was at the Bridge of Life School in Cambodia. I was excited to bring a dream to fruition.

Beyond the cultural and historical sites that I anticipated visiting, I had an unstated reason that likely colored my conversation about Pathfinders in ways I wasn’t even aware of. Anyone who knows me well knows that I covet my passport for the stamps within it. And my mom and I have a friendly competition over who has visited the most countries.

I am fortunate to be affluent enough to even have such a competition with my mom. I have access to books, documentaries, and the Internet, which allow me to be familiar with distant cultures and their significant sites. I have leisure time to contemplate a voyage to the Antarctic tundra for no better reason than to see a few penguins. The very opportunity to participate in an undertaking such as Pathfinders is a privilege, and one I didn’t, and don’t, take lightly.

Pre-Pathfinders, I was aware of the concept of volunteering as an excuse to travel, even though I hadn’t heard the label “voluntourism” applied to it. The idea disgusted me. It felt exploitative. It felt hypocritical. It felt superficial. I’m embarrassed that I unwittingly associated Pathfinders with that kind of service, even if briefly.

Using the most basic definition, Pathfinders is voluntourism. We traveled to do service. But voluntourism also connotes insincerity. The reason voluntourism is a bad word is that the picture it paints is of westerners paying an organization a fee, one that, granted, helps the organization serve its community, in exchange for an “authentic” volunteering experience. The kind of projects one does on a voluntourism trip can seem invented for the purpose of giving the volunteers something to do rather than projects that grow organically out of the challenges faced by the community. It is the kind of volunteering that gets in the way as much as it helps.

Pathfinders specifically sought out organizations that were, if not founded, then run by locals. We took on projects that were community directed. Who else knows what a community needs? We offered what resources we could, but approached each community by asking, “How do you want us to help?” I can’t say we were 100% successful at avoiding the pitfalls of voluntourism, but we did all we could to avoid them.

I was excited about the sites that we would see, but more excited about the circumstances that Pathfinders would create—a neutral place where interfaith encounters could happen organically.

We didn’t announce our humanism when we started a new project, though it would come up on it’s own almost without fail. It was never right away, always happening after we’d already worked, laughed, and ate with the members of the organization and the community we served. We met as people first, and we talked about our beliefs later. It’s easier to talk to a flesh and blood person about our differing beliefs than it is to talk to a representative atheist or Christian or Jew.

Through Pathfinders, we were able to create natural conversations with people we met about the experiences we shared. Some of these people had never met an “out” atheist before, and I hope some preconceived notions about the goodness or evil of atheists were adjusted. The service itself had nothing to do with our individual beliefs, but through it we formed connections across religious differences. The director of the organization we worked with in Ghana, for example, was a devout Christian. In the office, during our down time, we talked. We talked about women’s rights and US relations with African nations and, yes, God. We didn’t agree on everything, but we departed friends each with a better understand of how and why the other lives.

In this way, traveling was only a means to important ends—people communicating with people and sharing beliefs, strangers breaking bread together and becoming friends, and human beings from diverse backgrounds exchanging ideas about cultures, beliefs, and lifestyles. That is what Pathfinders is all about.

This piece was originally published with NonProphet Status. You can read it here.

My relatives were persecuted.  We are pretty sure all my family members who did not immigrate to the United States when my great-grandparents did, before the war, perished during the war. As far as I am concerned, the fact of their murder is not relevant to my reaction at the museum. I cried for every unjust act committed during the Holocaust. I do not want to malign the strong and just reaction that anyone would have when their loved ones and their people are persecuted and killed.  But do I have to be related to care so much?

Prayers for the victims of the Cambodian genocide.

Then I spent last August in Cambodia, which is healing from its own genocide.  The wounds are still fresh.  Millions of people perished, yet before I began preparing for this trip the genocide was barely in my consciousness.  I knew that it had happened, but not much more.  I now know much more.  And I cried for every unjust act committed in Cambodia.

But why didn’t I know about it?

I didn’t know about the Rwandan genocide until an Academy Award winning film about it was released.  I should have known.  I am interested in the world.  I am a student of war and peace and violence and nonviolence.  But, I did not learn about these genocides in school.  I never saw a documentary or read a book about them.  They were not discussed at home.  I think I didn’t know about these atrocities because the victims were too dissimilar from myself.  Just as the Israeli woman assumed my tears were for relatives, Cambodians and Rwandans were too distant from myself–nationally, politically, racially, religiously–to get true attention.

There was an assumption in Israel that my tears were for the my relatives who died in the Holocaust.  The assumption included a larger assumption that I am more likely to shed tears for the victims of the Holocaust because I am of Jewish decent than someone who is not Jewish.  The flip side of this is that I am not of Cambodian or Buddhist decent, so I would naturally care less for their genocide as for the genocide of the Jews.  Even if that were true, rarely does someone suggest I should shed equal tears for the victims in Rwanda who were not targeted because of their religion but where in fact largely Catholic. I am also of Catholic decent. They are as much my people as the Jews who died in the Holocaust are.

At S-21, the school-turned-torture-prison in Phnom Penh that is now a museum, there are rooms full of pictures of the victims of the place.  There are hundreds of photos, row after row, room after room.  Some of the faces show defeat, some show defiance, some show a haunting bit of a smile.  One room is dedicated to the, mostly Western, foreigners that were also taken to S-21.  Their photos are displayed along with their histories and the accusations that brought them to the prison.  Why were all the foreigners’ stories shared while the nationals’ stories remained largely untold?  Because the foreigners’ stories provide a point of connection for the museum visitors who are mostly Western tourists.

For me the most important section of the Holocaust museum was a room dedicated to heroes of the Holocaust who attempted and often succeeded at helping the persecuted groups of the Holocaust.  We have all heard tales of people who, at great personal risk, hide victims of persecution in their homes, sign illegal visas so persecuted people can escape the country, or smuggle supplies into ghettos to relieve the suffering.  We hear these stories and we love these stories.  I believe that as least part of the appeal is that these are people helping each other not because they are related, not because they share a religious or philosophical position, and not because they have anything to gain, but because it is the right thing to do.  Period.

This post is also published at State of Formation.