Reply to Would you let your teen cut short a service trip b/c unhappy?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. The trip is supposed to end with a pickup at 9am Friday. I told her DH would pick her up Thursday evening. That way she stays through the “closing ceremony” stuff with the group but will get sprung 12 hours early. Apparently several other kids are also getting picked up Thursday evening so things are pretty much over after that. She was not too happy but is sucking it up....

I’m not as negative about service trips as some people here are. It depends on the nature of the trip, obviously. In this one, the kids were working with an established NGO providing the unskilled labor. She learned how to put up drywall, frame windows, paint, use a drill, and so on. These are useful skills for a girl to have, and they learned a fair amount about the socioeconomic context in the neighborhood they worked in. Aside from disorganized counselors and a couple of mean girls, it seems like a good program.

I think kids need to learn to: spend time away from home; deal with new and sometimes annoying people; learn new skills, learn that there are many people both in the US and elsewhere who face struggles they do not face; discover that they can learn from strangers, etc. Well-run service trips that work in appropriate and respectful ways with local NGOS can do all those things, and provide local groups with free labor. Are there poorly run trips that are basically tourism for privileged kids and offer no benefit for local communities? Sure. But not all service trips are like that.[/quote]
They are all like that, how much did you pay for this? All of these are poorly run and they are all like that. DH did do Habitat for Humanity in DC area, but he is an electrician and did work that would cost someone else thousands of dollars, you privilege and ignorance is appalling. You want you kid to learn to put dry wall? And you outsource it and called say she is doing a service?[/quote]

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