How (Not) to Start an Orphanage

by Tara Winkler

  So Sally sent an email to Fred explaining that we weren’t ready for a major news story yet, but thanked him for thinking of us.

  Later that day, I had a call from Sally. I answered in surprise—it was expensive to call from Australia, so we usually emailed.

  ‘Fred Nerk just called me and he was absolutely revolting!’ she said, her voice tight with shock. ‘He told me he’d heard we’d accepted another media deal with a different network, and when I told him that wasn’t true, he accused me of lying! Then he accused me of withholding funds from you and the kids! I can’t believe this!’

  ‘What?’ I exclaimed. ‘Bloody hell! Why would he do that? Why would he say that? This is not what we need right now.’ Sally told me to try not to worry. But I was worrying. I was worrying a lot!

  About a half an hour later, my phone lit up with a strange number. I answered, heart pumping.

  Yep, it was Fred. His demeanour was that of a deeply concerned friend. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, Tara, but we’ve found out that your friend Sally has some other agenda for working with you. She’s not focused on helping the kids, like you are. Why else wouldn’t she want you to take part in our story?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not that,’ I squeaked. ‘It’s just the kids have been through so much and we don’t think it’s in their best interest to be filmed.’ Then I blurted, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to go now.’

  I talked to Sally, and Peter, and Jedtha, and we decided to get some advice from Oliver Shtein, a contact of Peter’s who was an expert in charity law.

  On Oliver’s advice, we issued an official press statement, explaining that as a fledgling organisation with the best interests of the children in mind, we did not feel ready for such high-profile media coverage.

  But Fred wasn’t going to take this lying down. He sent another email, saying he meant every word he said in his previous email, and that it was a shame we had been ‘dishonest’ about signing up with another media outlet. All he ever wanted, he said, was honesty. And so, once again, we were falsely accused of having another media deal. I rolled my eyes at this, but inside I felt like a helpless mouse that had just managed to escape the clutches of a lion.

  Forty-eight hours later, Jedtha came to me with some chilling news: a foreign reporter had turned up at SKO and interviewed Rath.

  I don’t know exactly how Jedtha found this out, but news travels fast in Battambang, in that gossipy small-town way. Someone also told him they’d overheard Rath tell the reporters that we’d stolen the children and were planning to traffic them.

  By now I was a nervous wreck. This was more serious than a threatening phone call. Reporters were here! In Battambang! And they were out to get us.

  Rath’s story was absurd—fancy a rapist accusing us of being the criminals. But the last thing we needed was for these reporters, who were just after a ‘good story’, to fan the flames and enrage Rath any further. They were aiding the abuser and putting his victims at risk. These were real lives they were messing with. How could they be so reckless, so heartless? I couldn’t understand it.

  Then I got another call on my mobile phone from an unfamiliar number.

  ‘Hello, Tara?’ It was a male voice with an Aussie accent. ‘This is John Smith—I emailed you a few weeks ago about wanting to film a story about CCT?’

  Ah—I remembered that name. John Smith (again, I’ve changed the name) was a documentary maker or something. I’d had an email from him about a week earlier, wanting to talk about filming a story. But when I got back to him asking for more info, he hadn’t followed up.

  How on earth had he got my mobile phone number, though? We’d only communicated by email and no one knew my number outside of my small circle of friends and family—except, of course, the current affairs show . . .

  ‘Hi John,’ I said, my mind racing with all these thoughts. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m in the middle of things right now—do you mind if I call you back?’ I got off the phone as quickly as I could. Had John got my number from Fred Nerk? Was he working undercover for him?

  I started imagining cameras everywhere, all pointed at me: This is the girl who stole children and planned to traffic them.

  When I told Peter and Sally there was now an Australian film crew working in Battambang, they pulled out all the stops. They got in touch with a second lawyer and a friend who worked for the ABC. The advice was unanimous: lie low, don’t do anything, just wait them out because they can’t stay in Battambang forever and if they don’t catch you on camera, they don’t have a story.

  So now I was under house arrest at CCT. And because my room was right beside the main entrance to the house, which was always open during the day, I was pretty much confined to my hot little room.

  Holding it together isn’t easy when you find yourself trapped in a room that resembles a solitary confinement unit that’s hot enough to practise Bikram yoga. Especially when the cook keeps coming in and saying things like: ‘There’s a foreigner with a big camera at the gate, filming into the compound.’

  It didn’t help that my phone kept buzzing with phone calls that I wasn’t foolish enough to answer. I was trying to read a book on Khmer history when a lovely text message came through from John Smith. Why, he demanded, was it so difficult to get a response from myself or CCT? He said he had a number of recorded interviews making ‘very damaging’ accusations about me and CCT. He was offering me a chance to put forward my side of the story. And he would have thought we’d appreciate the media interest and its power as a vehicle for raising funds! He warned that if we didn’t address the accusations he had documented, there may be ‘serious consequences’.

  Now all my fears were confirmed. We were being set up to create a bullshit, sensationalist ‘news story’. All for the sake of ratings!

  I’d never felt so powerless.

  If CCT’s first introduction to the Australian public was a big black mark against our name then we’d probably never recover, no matter how much good publicity followed. Australians can be suspicious and untrusting of overseas charities as it is.

  What was I going to do? I locked the door to my sweatbox and flopped down onto my mattress, head pounding, feeling utterly helpless.

  The temperatures climbed and the mattress started to feel like a roasting pan. I was so hot I couldn’t think straight. I grabbed a pillow and flopped onto the tiles, Khmer-style. That’s how I found out that Cambodians are smart to sleep on the floor. The heat and pressure that had built up in my head seemed to drain away into the cold tiles.

  For the next several days I worked from the floor of the sweatbox, putting together reports, holding meetings with staff—everything happened on the floor. Heng very kindly tried to make food for me but couldn’t quite grasp the vegetarian thing, so she resorted to supplying me with endless bags of grilled bananas and green mangos.

  The phone kept ringing and I kept ignoring it. Following Oliver’s Shtein’s advice, I kept detailed records of each call and message, noting the date, time and phone number of each call.

  Carolyn Shine, who was fast becoming my closest friend at this time, put me in touch with a friend with PR experience, who confirmed that we should just keep doing what we were doing.

  About four days later, the calls and messages finally stopped. But I still had to stay in my room until we knew for sure that John Smith had left Battambang.

  Twenty-four hours after the last message from John, another call came through from a different number.

  I had to know if the coast was clear or not. So I answered: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi Tara. It’s Fred Nerk from the current affairs show. I’m in Cambodia.’

  I said nothing, feeling the blood drain from my head.

  ‘My colleague Jane Doe and I will be in Battambang tomorrow and would love to catch up with you for dinner, without the cameras.’

  ‘Thanks for the offer, Fred,’ I blurted. ‘I’mverybusyatthemoment butI’llgetbacktoyousoon.’ I couldn’t hang up the phone quickly enough. />
  Frantic, I called Peter. He said he’d call the lawyer and Sally and get right back to me.

  Half an hour later, Peter called with the verdict. The bottom line was, we didn’t trust them, so no matter what, we weren’t doing the story. That being the case, there was no point in listening to them sweet-talk me over dinner. I should send a message back thanking them for their offer but restating that I stood by the press statement we’d released.

  Of course, they still weren’t taking no for an answer. They persisted with phone calls and messages.

  Fred picked up where John left off, bombarding me with unfriendly text messages. A colleague of his we’ll call ‘Jane Doe’ seemed to take on the role of ‘good cop’. She would send messages like:

  Hi Tara! [Jane Doe] here from [large TV network] . . . Trying to reach you and would love to meet—no cameras—over a meal to check information I have about your orphanage. Please reply :0)

  And then Fred would write:

  I’d still love for you to give me a call. We are doing a story and were hoping to do it with your help. There’s some serious questions that need answering about your organisation. Questions I hoped could be cleared up by you. We’ve interviewed a number of experienced NGO-related people here in Cambodia and Australia who’ve raised questions about your organisation. Your refusal to even meet raises more questions. We need your help to respond.

  Which would result in me sending things like this to Peter:

  They keep calling and calling. I’m just not picking up. Wish they’d go away! I’m scared.

  This went on for ten days. I was dying to go outside, check my emails, do a few hundred stretching exercises and eat something—anything—besides grilled banana and green mango. But I had to wait until we could confirm that Fred and his crew had left Battambang.

  Back in Sydney, Peter was furious at how I was being treated. He hated seeing me scared and miserable. When Sally told him the current affairs show team had gone digging for dirt on us, he was even angrier.

  Things went quiet for a few days, but we couldn’t be sure if the crew had left Battambang and I was safe to leave my room or not. So Peter came up with a brilliant idea . . .

  With the chutzpah he’s famous for, he called Jane Doe on her mobile number, trying to sound happy and upbeat, like an old friend.

  ‘Hey, Jane!’ he chirped. ‘Are you back in Sydney yet?’

  ‘Yeah, we just got back yesterday,’ she said. ‘Sorry, who is this?’

  ‘Thank you. Goodbye!’ And he hung up.

  Then, on a roll, he decided to call John Smith, the mysterious filmmaker.

  ‘Hi, John!’ he said cheerily. ‘Just a quick question. Are you still with the current affairs show?’

  ‘Yeah, I am. Sorry, who’s speaking?’

  ‘FUCK YOU!’

  Peter let me know I was now free to emerge, blinking, into the bright Cambodian sunshine again.

  Fucking hell, that was unbelievable, I thought. What next?

  It didn’t take long to find out . . .

  Because it seemed that when the current affairs show went digging for dirt on us . . . they’d found some! It turned out there was something very wrong with CCT’s official registration in Australia.

  That was a horrible shock to all of us—we’d tried so hard from the start to be squeaky clean and do everything by the book. But it turned out we actually didn’t have tax-exemption status in Australia, or even a licence to fundraise. This meant that, technically, the fundraiser we’d held at the art gallery was illegal and we owed tax on every dollar we’d raised.

  We tried to contact the ‘charity consultant’ Caz and I had hired to set up CCT to take this up with him. But guess what? He’d skipped the country. It turned out he was a complete fraud and a con man.

  Oliver Shtein put his hand up again to help sort things out. (Oliver’s law firm, Bartier Perry, has continued to provide free legal services to CCT in Australia. Thanks, Oliver!)

  Oliver found out that our trust deed had also not been set up properly. Getting this news from Sally and Peter over the next few days was like receiving multiple blows to the head, one after another after another.

  Fortunately, Sally and Peter found that the staff at the tax department had already heard about our dodgy consultant. There were a number of other people who were in the same situation. So they knew the fault didn’t lie with us and were gracious and understanding about it all. They told us there were lots of unofficial small fundraisers like ours happening around Australia without proper licences and mostly they don’t bother policing them. But as this was brought to their attention by the current affairs show, they were required to take action. They wouldn’t fine us, but they needed us to close down CCT in Australia. This meant pulling down the website, closing the bank account and starting the registration process all over again.

  In the meantime, all the cheques we’d received after the Sydney Morning Herald piece had to be returned, and the only way people could donate was via a laborious and costly international transfer or international money order to our bank account in Cambodia.

  It was a devastating blow.

  Registering an Australian charity to support an overseas project wasn’t simple.

  For the next few months, three little letters came to dominate our conversations—DGR.

  ‘DGR’ stands for ‘Deductible Gift Recipient’ status. Any new Australian-based charity we formed would require DGR status so donors could claim a tax deduction on their donations. Getting that tax deduction on charitable donations is a big part of Australian culture—everyone knows about it and expects to get it (as you would, really). Without it, our credibility as a professional organisation and our ability to secure funding from Australia would take a major hit.

  We were up shit creek and in desperate need of a paddle. So when I saw one floating by, I grabbed it.

  It came in the form of an email from a man named Terry, who was working at a local NGO that we’ll call New Dawn Orphanage. New Dawn had been the primary target of the current affairs show witch-hunt. They were filming an exposé on a couple of Australian celebrities who were supporting New Dawn. So, as it turned out, CCT had become a casualty in this story—a case of ‘why not kill two birds with one stone?’ In an act of solidarity, he wrote to introduce himself and suggest we catch up to share war stories.

  So one afternoon, Jedtha and I rode out to New Dawn to meet him.

  It was about a ten-minute ride from town—further than I’d been for a while. We crossed the river and headed down a dirt road into rice fields that extended, green and flat, all the way to the horizon. But as we came round a bend, a large white ‘castle’ seemed to loom up out of the flat rural landscape.

  Holy shit! I thought to myself. CCT’s quaint little home seemed so humble compared with the massive white-walled fortress that New Dawn had set up for their kids.

  But as we drove through the impressive, wrought-iron gates, I realised just how new this orphanage was. It was still very much a building site—noisy, dusty and full of construction workers and unfinished structures. Not exactly kid-friendly, I thought. We followed the internal road towards a small group of kids hanging out in front of one of eight white bungalows.

  The kids all turned and watched curiously as we pulled to a halt. A tall, kind-looking man in his fifties came out of one of the buildings to greet us.

  ‘Tara, Jedtha, Hi! I’m Terry.’ He shook my hand warmly. ‘Let’s go and talk in my office.’ A few of the littler kids dangled off his arms as he walked.

  It wasn’t long before Terry and I were chatting like old friends. It was great to have a chance to talk to another Aussie about everything we’d been through.

  Then Terry told me his story, which was, in a way, chillingly similar.

  New Dawn had been started by a group of Australians to help a monk called Samlain who was running a small, struggling orphanage at his pagoda. These Aussies were connected with a large AIDS charity in Australia. With help fr
om the AIDS charity and the two Australian celebrities (who were subsequently targeted by the current affairs show), they raised the funds to buy the block of land we were standing on and build a shiny new orphanage.

  Shortly after the monk and his children moved into the new premises, the Australians discovered Samlain had defrauded them. Terry said he had deceived the local community into donating the land to build a school, but nobody told the Australians about that. Samlain then sold it to the Australians at a hefty price and pocketed the cash. On top of that, for many years, Samlain had inflicted terrible abuse on the children.

  Terry and another board member had managed to get the corrupt monk removed from the organisation and now Terry was trying to juggle multiple management and administrative roles just to keep things going.

  Meanwhile, the disgruntled Samlain launched a campaign of terror on the orphanage. He and his gang of thugs would wait near the orphanage in the evening and then, as the orphanage staff drove out the gates and down the dark, unlit road back into town, the thugs would drive up beside them and try to kick them off their motos.

  Terry’s story got even darker.

  He found out that nearly a third of the kids were somehow ‘related’ to Samlain. He had organised these kids into a group who acted as his henchmen. Terry said he’d found balaclavas, machetes and other weapons hidden in one of the kids’ dormitories.

  And then, just when things were settling down a little, Terry and another board member were contacted by my favourite current affairs show!

  The journalists twisted their words around to make a story that defamed the orphanage’s celebrity supporters, blaming them for the orphanage’s lack of funding.

  Hearing all this made me comfortable enough to relate everything the current affairs show had put us through, too. I’d been trapped in my room! They tried to set Sally and me against each other! They turned up at the gates and scared us all half to death and now we had to give back all our donations . . .