She hated her visit to the SOS Children’s Village in Bambous, the French gap year traveller with long golden hair and green eyes. She had planned for it to be her Mother Theresa moment, you see. Her gap year Facebook album already contained pictures of her trekking the Australian outback, sipping a café crème in Montmartre and taking yoga lessons in Bali – snapshots that made her look worldly and fun. Now, she aimed for ‘kind-hearted’ to complete the picture. She needed a bunch of dark-skinned kids in a developing country who would hug her tight and smile into the smartphone camera.

The gap year traveller imagined their brown little fingers in her blond strands of hair. Beautiful contrast. Amazing photo opp. The problem was just that the Mauritian SOS kids didn’t appear as grateful for her tiny gifts– pens and biscuits – as she wanted them to be (tears of happiness would look good on Facebook). It was only when the gap year traveller’s “guide”, a friend from Mauritius, suggested that they head to the pockets of poverty instead that she finally cheered up: “We’ll take pictures there and after that we’ll hit the beach, right? I need a mojito.”

The gap year traveller – she exists for real and this is a true story – is not unique. It’s an ongoing trend for people to throw in a dose of humanitarianism in their social media image-building. One could argue that although the attitude is disturbing, the needy get the help regardless of what the ulterior motive is. Possibly – but they pay for it with their dignity. And if you really stop to think about image building, you realise that so do the helpers. Their lives are no longer lives but merely a show. In the game, they objectify themselves even more than they do the subjects of their “help”.

While underprivileged children might be too young to understand that they are a brick in a social media game, adults do. Those who are subjected to the most extreme form of poverty tourism, the slum tours organised in India for the enjoyment of overseas visitors and privileged Indians, often say that they feel like animals in a zoo. It’s a high price to pay for the image-building of the privileged, and something we should bear in mind when dealing with Lovebridge, the governmentfunded humanitarian project that is making headlines at the moment.

While the Lovebridge vision rests on an interesting thought – the project pairs up privileged families with underprivileged ones, and makes “two worlds that usually never mix interact” (the project promoters’ own words) – we can only hope that it doesn’t attract the wrong types of people. There is no easy structural solution to the problem as NGOs can hardly quiz volunteers about their motives for wanting to help. But what we can do to reverse the image-building trend is take away the one thing that these people feed on – the attention. Never encourage the gap year traveller and her perverted hunger for approval with your “like”.

For more views and in-depth analysis of current issues, subscribe to Weekly for as little as Rs110 a month. Free delivery to your door. Contact us:touria.prayag@lexpress.mu