I traveled to a remote town in Hungary and worked with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers for ten days. I certainly enjoyed the experience, and working with the families that would ultimately end up occupying the homes we were building was a unique and memorable experience.

I understand the economic principle of comparative advantage, and I felt like this was economically an inefficient way to provide housing to low income Hungarians. I'm not an experienced carpenter, and I could have easily paid for three real carpenter's to work in Hungary in my place by simply donating the income I would have generated by working at home at my ordinary job rather than traveling to Hungary myself. In a technical sense, I was hurting rather than helping the overall world economy by not doing what I was best at. Knowing all this ahead of time, I was skeptical of this voluntourism trip that a friend of mine had talked me into.

Working in Hungary for ten days, with the group of around twenty other people from the USA, gave me time to reflect on my decision to take on the volunteer work. I still believe that it isn't an economically efficient way to build the houses--we were amateur builders. However,
what my simple economic thinking about the trip didn't account for was the more emotional impacts that the volunteering had on the participants and beneficiaries. (One of the requirements on the recipients of the homes is that they work on the home being built for them too until it is finished.)

The volunteers in the group all seemed to have a very positive experience doing the work. It was satisfying to see the progress we made, it was satisfying to work with a team of interesting people of many different backgrounds, it was fun to take meals together and socialize in the evenings together, and it was heart warming to meet the clearly grateful families that would end up in the houses. These, to some extent narcissistic, rewards seem to be a key factor in the success of Habitat for Humanity: people like doing it and keep going back.

I've been dragged to many charity events, dinners, galas, auctions, runs, walks and so forth. I don't really enjoy them, but the experience of working in Hungary despite the commitment of time and expense was something I'm glad I did.

Furthermore, there were other important effects. I discovered that at first, when Habitat had first arrived at the town, the people there wondered why the workers from the US couldn't find jobs in their own country; they didn't understand that people would volunteer rather than be paid to build homes. Volunteering to help others apparently wasn't common in this previously communist country. Seeing volunteers working on these homes in these communities led some of the locals to pitch in too.

Finally, another benefit was the prolonged exposure to the people in the community. We took swims at lunch time in the very nice community swimming pool which seemed to be the town's main source of day time recreation, and we hung out with the locals in the evening in a local pub that we could walk to. Everywhere we went people were friendly and would make an effort to come up to us and talk. I think it gave us a very positive view of the people of Hungary and them a positive view of us and the United States as well.