Ivan Illich, SJ Blasts International Volunteers from White Culture

Read this article if you are, or ever have been, a white volunteer in an international setting, for whatever period of time, and are interested in getting your heart exploded.
I intend to blog about it soon, but for now, I would like the world to know I´m thinking about it.
Some ¨favorite¨ quotes of mine:

Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.
You start on your task without any training. Even the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting you?
People who understand that your own bad consciences push you to this gesture would laugh condescendingly.

There is no way for you to really meet with the underprivileged, since there is no common ground whatsoever for you to meet on

If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell.

The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn't have been volunteers in the first place.