I’m ambivalent about this piece. It can’t fully decide if it’s more upset about the fact that poor kids are being falsely described as orphans in order to lighten the purses of wealthy tourists, or because these kids are clearly being exploited for profit, and possibly even sexually abused.Still, the actual story is much, much better than the short abstract which accompanies the piece.
more about “Cambodia’s ‘fake’ orphans – 8 Nov 2008“, posted with vodpod
That was an interesting story. Correct me if I am wrong but I was always under the impression that most of Cambodia’s so-called orphananges very rarely had actual orphans. I thought that most of them were composed of kids whose parents were unwilling or unable to care for them. And I am not sure how orphanages here would get funding other than through foreign donations that involved exploitation of the kids somehow. Follow-up question: Is it possible to run a business/charity/NGO in Cambodia without exploiting someone?
That’s been my (less-than-fully-investigated) impression as well, though I think that if you have parents that are unwilling or unable to care for you, you probably qualify as an orphan. More disturbing to me is the aspect that some folks concentrated on in the story – the exploitation of these children as tourist attractions (conscience salves, the super-cynical might say).
Followup answer: probably not.
Follow-up question: Is it possible to run a business/charity/NGO in Cambodia without exploiting someone?
I would have to agree Alison. From a short stay in PP, I met two or three NGO workers in their early 20s from the US that seemed to treat their work at orphanages and elsewhere more as resume boosters than actually being beneficial to the kids they worked with.
Elsewhere in the country, all the other tourists I met fawned over the children and “OMG! They’re so cute!” which I’m sure helps boost a few bucks going into the areas but I’m not really sure how this seeps down into the communities.
My brief trip raised more questions than answers about the whole nature of aid in Cambodia.
Unless it has powerful and well-placed allies or a very high international profile, any organization in Cambodia that has a noticeable cash flow will be bled by corrupt officials. The piece mentions that the one guy was fired when he offered to hire a bookkeeper.
That is the story writ small; it is true for the country as a whole. There is no proper bookkeeping because so much of money in the economy is paid out in bribes. (For example, Sam Rainsy, now the opposition leader, was fired as Minister of Finance in 1995 and stripped of his seat in the National Assembly because he demanded to see where the money from timber concessions went. That’s right, they canned the Minister of Finance because he wanted to see the books!)
Even legitimate orphanages, run by basically honest people, will have to pay into the system to maintain whatever ‘license’ they supposedly need in order to operate. The assumption being, actual law aside, that if you don’t have permission to do something, you are not allowed to do it.
This means that money is getting skimmed, even when it’s only skimmed by the operator of the charity on behalf of the police and other officials.
This creates a serious dilemma for well-meaning people who want to support small organizations and charities: to support them, in most cases, is to support the very power structure that is keeping Cambodia as poor as it is.
If there’s money to be made through orphanages, then there must be orphanages, which means there have to be orphans. Or poor kids who will play orphans for gullible if well-intentioned tourists.
I’m very interesting about the case of orphan children of Cambodia, Thailand and Lao. I’m about to do a master in anthropology on the way that orphan children are culturally seen by the population of these countries.
The last news that I had about the orphan children of Cambodia is that many of them were kidnapped in their own poor villages, while parents were working… Yes, they were kidnapped — it is a new form of modern slavery ! C’est inadmissible que le monde soit aussi désorienté…