When I was a 9 year old girl in Catholic school, once or twice a year we would be brought into the gymnasium as an entire school to learn about the work of our local missionaries. The presentation would be simple: a couple photos of skinny Ecuadorian children in rags and mud, a simplified discussion about world poverty distilled to a 3rd grader's understanding, and then an ask form to go home to our parents with a list of school supplies requested for donation. Carrying in boxes of crayons and notebooks, we'd all proudly give in a big Wal-Mart bag from our home and go upon our merry way, ensured of the better world we were helping to build, one pencil case at a time. Besides the occasional mention of PeaceCorps in movies growing up (I'm looking at you over in the corner, Baby), missionaries were just about the only people I ever heard about travelling to far off lands to help impoverished communities. This kind of work, in my mind, was only carried out by specific kinds of people in the world, dedicated servant leaders and social justice warriors. It wasn't something that someone like me could do - or at least it wasn't until now.

Voluntourism. It's yet another portmanteau, as if we hadn't smooshed together enough words to create new industry terms lately, and the definition is obvious. Voluntourism is a form of vacationing, where tourists focus on saving Pandas and building clean drinking wells, rather than sitting on a beach with a Pina Colada. According to a recent study by Wakefield Research, an astonishing 62% of Americans express interest in combining volunteerism with tourism on their next vacation. Most voluntourists are young females, aged 20-25, though high school students are increasingly participating, according to consulting group Tourism, Research, and Marketing. Giving back has become vital to so many young people, companies, many of which are in the tech industry, are increasingly offering paid time off for volunteering activities as a recruitment strategy, in addition to standard vacation and sick time policies. As a result, voluntourism has become one of the fastest growing areas of tourism in the travel industry. So, the question is simple - are these bright-eyed Millenials actually making a difference, or just getting some hardhitting snaps for their #wanderlust collection on Instagram?

The answer is a bit unclear and critics of voluntourism are widespread. While the concept of building a school for the underprivileged children of an African village may sound like a noble conquest, many critics point out that voluntourists often fail to possess the skills needed for the projects they sign up for. Often, myriad droves of liberal college freshmen head out to foreign lands with little to no understanding of native language, cultural norms and mores, or even the trade skills required for their tasks, such as carpentry or engineering skills to build the desperately needed school or educational or teaching experience to help instruct the children. As Pippa Biddle points out in her article "The Problem With Little White Girls, Boys and Voluntourism":