Malawi, Orphans, and the Search of Authenticity in Protestant Short-Term Missions

This article combines Victor Turner's ideas on pilgrimage and communitas with tourism imaginaries to explore how United States students volunteering in Protestant short-term mission trips (STMs) to an orphanage in Malawi articulate their experiences. We find that volunteers travel to Malawi to seek an encounter that brings them closer to their authentic and spiritual selves and create meaningful relationships with each other. This is most achievable in a poor place that is thought to be void of the accoutrements of modernity, such as social media platforms and cell phones, which participants believe mask authenticity. Malawi is a popular destination because volunteers are able to bear witness to poor, suffering orphans that are able to express "joy in their poverty" presumably because of their singular reliance on a type of faith that eludes the privileged. This raises ethical issues as it reaffirms asymmetrical, post-colonial power relations, and an unanticipated outcome is the perpetuation of the institutionalization of children that have identifiable family members in local communities. We conclude that in lieu of orphanage tourism, volunteers should focus on community-based engagements with children and their families.