How does the global citizenship discourse privilege Western notions of the human experience and marginalize indigenous worldviews?

While abroad in Costa Rica, the few projects of volunteerism we had also made me feel uncomfortable. The one that has stuck with me is when we visited a coffee farm near the cloud forests of Monteverde and picked coffee beans off the plants alongside undocumented Nicaraguan immigrant workers. As a group of white American students, it really bothered me as we worked alongside them, acting as if the few measly coffee beans we picked were really doing anything. I began conversing in Spanish with the person I was working with, who I, unfortunately, forgot the name of, because I could tell they were uncomfortable around our presence. As we began talking about Spanish music and cracking jokes, he began to relax and we began talking about the work they do at the farms. He told me that they usually work from sunrise to around 4pm, a 10 workday. This didn’t seem all that surprising as I expected them to have longer than usual work hours because of the demanding nature of the type of manual labor performed. As our literal 15 minutes of picking the coffee beans were up, we were told to head back and regroup for the rest of the tour. I overheard a classmate of mine say “this is fun, I could do this all day” and it infuriated me. I didn’t speak up because frankly I was going to be around this group of people for the next three months and frankly was afraid of being outcasted for making them uncomfortable.

As the tour around the coffee farm ended, which boasted about its organic, sustainable, and ‘great’ treatment of workers ended, someone asked the guide, who was a family member who owned the farm, about the usual workday of the people who pick the coffee beans. He said that they work from 8am to 4pm, with long breaks to eat included. I perceived that as nothing less than a lie. Whether to make us feel better about the tour or to hide the realities of their workers’ treatment, it didn’t sit well with me. All of this is to say that in many occasions, these projects of volunteerism are purposefully designed to leave the rich western with a feel-good moment. Without this feel-good moment, how else would you get them to come back and spend more? This emphasis is why the discourse prioritizes the western human experience; until people can go abroad and understand that in reality, they don’t always deserve to be praised for simple acts of volunteerism, I don’t think the discourse will favor the indigenous perspective.