by Tara Winkler
This dilemma gets thorny because, in order for people to care enough to give money, they need to understand the problem. How do you help people understand poverty without showing them what poverty looks like?
I do understand that this issue is not black and white and there are exceptions. Even today I’m constantly caught in the tug-of-war between needing to raise funds and wanting to protect CCT’s beneficiaries from exploitation. I know if I did paint depressing stories of the kids’ lives, or make them sing and dance for donations, we’d raise a lot more money. But the beneficiaries of any NGO have a right to dignity and privacy. And Cambodia deserves better than the ‘poor third world’ tropes that present a distorted image of what is, in reality, a beautiful and diverse country.
Today, our policy is that only our staff can help us with fundraising events—this includes Sinet, who is now a part-time casual member of the CCT team. When we do tell stories, we change the names and identifying details to protect privacy. We try very hard not to use stereotypes and to show only dignified, empowered images of our beneficiaries. It’s never straightforward. Even with adult beneficiaries, there’s a big question mark around whether they’re truly able to provide ethical, informed consent when asked to appear in a photograph or video or have their story told in print. But today we have policies and guidelines on identity protection and informed consent. They help guide us and our beneficiaries through the process of informed consent to ensure best practices are maintained.
Even so, it’s a difficult line to walk and every time it comes up, we really wrestle with the ethics of it.
I was still trying to process my mixed feelings about taking the kids to Singapore when I got back to CCT. So it was a particular shock to me to discover that there were suddenly three more kids at CCT.
They were lovely kids, incredibly sweet and well mannered. But where had they come from?
‘A village chief called DoSVY about a family who were struggling to support their six kids, so DoSVY asked us to investigate,’ Jedtha explained. ‘The parents are good people but very poor. Savenh and I agreed to bring three of the kids to CCT.’
I was quite stunned to hear this—I thought Jedtha and the rest of the staff fully understood what we were trying to do with our new family reunion projects.
‘But—oh dear. But Loak Khrew, we want CCT to keep families together, not split them up, remember?’ I spluttered. ‘Poverty is not a good reason for children to be taken away from their parents and put in an orphanage. And what about their siblings who were left behind? What will become of them? Are they now just sentenced to a life of poverty?’
It was a horrible situation to be in. After everything we’d just been through, the last thing I wanted was to have to veto one of Jedtha’s decisions. It just goes to show how deeply hard-wired the reflex to put children in orphanages is in Cambodia.
Jedtha had just done the right thing as far as most Cambodians saw it. A 2011 UNICEF report found that over 90 per cent of Cambodians believe that children should be sent to live in orphanages if their family is too poor to support them. The thinking is: They’ll get fed, they’ll get healthcare, they’ll get an education . . .
This is a sad and quite recent change in attitude. In Cambodian culture, family is extremely important. Cambodian people are likely to remain living in multi-generational households their entire lives and traditionally Cambodians have cared for vulnerable and orphaned children through informal kinship care (which just means being cared for by a member of one’s extended family—aunts, uncles, grandparents, adult siblings or family friends).
But this culture of family-based care has been eroded by a belief that orphanages are the best way to ensure a good future for disadvantaged children.
The flaws inherent in this way of responding to poverty are bigger and deeper than I suspected at the time. I was only just starting to catch on to the fact that parents in Cambodia were reflexively putting their kids into orphanages in response to the problems posed by poverty, not the lack of family. The issues with separating kids from their families were not an easy ‘get’ for anyone—especially for Jedtha and the staff, who lived in a world where, for decades, residential care had been widely seen as the only option.
But Jedtha listened with an open mind and took it all on board. We decided we should go back out to the village where the kids’ family lived to meet the parents and assess the situation properly.
The following day, Jedtha, Savenh and I jumped on the motos and travelled down a dusty dirt road to a village about an hour out of Battambang city. We pulled up out the front of a traditional wooden home on stilts.
The parents of the three new kids were outside preparing food; their father was stoking the fire while their mother chopped vegetables. We sat down on a wooden log and chatted with them.
They were very sweet-natured people who loved their kids. They explained that they had farming skills and even some land of their own behind the house. They hoped to farm it, but hadn’t been able to raise the capital to buy the water pump and other equipment they needed to get started. With six children to support, they were really struggling. Sending three of the kids away to a place where they’d be fed and educated seemed like their only option.
But all they needed to start generating more income and keep the family together was some extra farming equipment. That was it! We agreed to buy them the equipment, as well as some bicycles so the kids could get to school—this would cost us far less than keeping the kids at CCT and it would mean the family could stay together.
Both parents were overjoyed with this idea and excited to have their children back. The kids were delighted, too.
When a family is too poor to support their own children, the answer should never be to remove the children from their family. The solution is to empower the family to be better able to care for their own children. And it is significantly more cost effective to support children in their family than to support them in residential care.
Once Jedtha saw with his own eyes that this approach was much better than just bringing kids who still had homes and families to CCT, he was able to explain it to the rest of the staff and put it into practice himself.
Around this same time, the Commune Leader of a village about twenty minutes out of Battambang asked us to take in a fourteen-year-old girl to live at CCT who’d recently been raped. The girl lived with her mother in a small village, but the perpetrator lived nearby and the mother was desperate to protect her daughter.
When the mother met us, her face lit up with hope. ‘Please please will you take her with you to the onga?’ Her attitude seemed to be: ‘Thank you, good white person! Please save my daughter and put her on the path of opportunity!’
It made me want to cry. It was such a typical example of the helpless, defeated attitude I was starting to see everywhere. I understood her plight but taking this young girl away from a loving, protective mother was not the right thing to do. The perpetrator needed to be removed, not the victim!
There was a time when we’d have snatched the young girl up and ‘saved’ her by taking her away from her family and community. But we knew better, now. So we worked with this family to help them report the case to the police and get the girl’s attacker arrested. And it worked. Getting a perpetrator convicted for rape is difficult, but it’s not impossible.
Even if we hadn’t been able to get a successful conviction, we could have assisted with temporary, alternative accommodation for the mother and her daughter, engaged the support of their community and commune leaders, and provided counselling and rehabilitation to the perpetrator. There are always other steps that can be taken to avoid the unnecessary institutionalisation of children with loving families.
I’m always saying to my team: if you want to see the problems that might result from a particular approach or practice, scale it up. When you scale it up as a thought experiment in your head, the potential problems start to jump out at you.
When you see a child in
a high-risk environment, like this young girl who’d been raped, removing her from the situation to keep her safe feels like the right thing to do. But what happens if you remove all the children in Cambodia who are living in high-risk environments and put them in an orphanage? You’ll find yourself institutionalising a very large percentage of the population, separating them from their families and communities. If a large percentage of the population grows up in an institution, the community pays a huge price for this in the future. Growing up without a good role model of what a family looks like affects people’s ability to parent the next generation. So the problems are passed on and the intergenerational cycle of poverty continues.
We learned this lesson once before in Australia—we call it ‘The Stolen Generations’.
17
In late November 2008, I drove down to Phnom Penh to pick up Charlie Teo from the airport.
I couldn’t believe a busy guy like Charlie would really make time to visit us, but here we were, on a Thursday afternoon, me and the famous brain surgeon, driving to Battambang in CCT’s van with Bob Dylan blasting from the car stereo.
Charlie loved every minute of the drive. The lovely rice paddies, the truck-boys riding on top of sky-high semitrailer loads of plastic bottles, the tractors towing metal cages full of commuters. We saw a three-metre blue teddy bear attached to the back of a bicycle, a guy carrying a sow upside down across the back of his motorbike, a cloud of brightly coloured helium balloons floating above the back of a moto . . . Charlie was mesmerised.
We stopped for petrol at a stand beside the road. I paid the guy who ran the stand and he promptly handed me a used Coke bottle full of petrol.
Charlie was amused. ‘Is this how everyone here sells petrol?’
I just smiled. I knew it seemed strange, but it was just part of everyday life to me.
‘Where do you want to stay?’ I asked on approach to Battambang. ‘The hotels here range anywhere from five to a hundred dollars a night.’
‘I’ll just crash with you,’ Charlie said.
‘Oh, you’d be very welcome, of course, but I’m not exactly set up for visitors. I don’t even have a spare couch to offer you,’ I suddenly felt very self-conscious about my living arrangements.
‘Do you have a spare pillow? I’ll just sleep on the floor. I often get home late after a long surgery and just pass out the floor. I’m not fussy.’
‘Okay . . . if you’re sure,’ I replied. ‘I’ve also got no air-con and no mosquito nets . . . Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’
After doing a quick turn around Battambang’s scary roundabout-god, we went to CCT and introduced Charlie to the staff and the kids. He soon had the kids giggling and stepping on each other’s heads to get his attention.
A visit from Charlie turned out to be like a visit from Santa—if Santa was a super-fit, motorbike-riding neurosurgeon with a broad Aussie accent and a drawer full of speeding tickets.
When the sun started to go down, Charlie said, ‘What time do the kids have dinner? Let’s take them out!’
So we ferried the kids to an all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue place in town. It was terrific fun.
We dropped the kids at CCT after dinner and headed back to my dark, hot little attic.
On the way Charlie was raving. ‘The kids seem so happy! You’re doing an amazing—’ He stopped mid-sentence. ‘Why are you driving like an old lady?’
‘The headlights have blown,’ I told him.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Charlie grinned. ‘You’re crazy!’
Charlie’s a fellow dog tragic, and I had spent a good part of the drive to Battambang raving about them. The dogs cried and sang with joy as they heard me getting out of the car.
‘Oh, they’ve missed you!’ Charlie observed, as he followed me up the rickety steps. Rosie cried, span in circles, jumped in the air, rolled over—all in one fluid movement. Franky howled and wagged his tail so hard his whole body was wiggling.
Charlie fussed over the dogs as I unlocked the door, hoping I’d left the place in a decent state. The dogs bolted in after me and Charlie followed.
‘Well, welcome to my humble abode,’ I said, snatching up some dirty clothes I’d left in a pile on the floor.
‘Yep, it’s certainly pretty humble,’ he said with a rueful smile.
‘You sure you’re happy on the floor? It’s not too late to take you to a hotel.’
‘Nah! Just chuck me a pillow and I’ll be out like a light in minutes,’ Charlie said.
As I drifted off to sleep, surrounded by my three sooky dogs, I thought to myself: Man, my life is weird. There’s a world famous neurosurgeon sleeping on my floor.
The next day, Charlie insisted we take the van to a mechanic to have the lights fixed. Then he bought a bunch of tools from the markets in town. He set to work repairing the fittings on my door so that it closed properly. Then he made a bunch of minor repairs to the CCT house, too.
While he was playing Mr Fix It, he got me to tell him more about CCT and my plans for the future. He seemed completely bowled over by everything he heard. He was so vocal and genuine it was incredibly uplifting. It’s often hard to see past the flaws in your own project. Incessant problem-solving ends up being the default focus. This was the first time I really saw CCT through someone else’s eyes.
That night I took Charlie to the Riverside Balcony Bar. We ate burgers and mingled with the expat crowd a little.
I struck up a conversation in Khmer with one of the local bar staff who immediately did a double take.
‘Are you Khmer?’ she asked sounding a bit confused. ‘Is your mother Khmer or something?’
‘No, sister, I’m Australian.’
‘Wow! Unbelievable! You speak Khmer so well! How long have you been here?’ she asked.
‘About a year and a half.’
‘A YEAR AND A HALF?!’ she shrieked, slamming her hand down on the wooden bar. ‘That’s unbelievable!’ Then she turned and said to Charlie in English, ‘Your friend, she’s amazing! She speaks Khmer so beautifully—she sounds just like Cambodian people!’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Charlie said, giving me a nudge with his elbow.
I won’t deny I was pleased that happened while Charlie was there.
We talked intently about CCT for some time that night. Then he said: ‘You know, I really like your approach. You’re obviously a natural leader, and your focus on long-term gains rather than short-term satisfaction is really quite astounding—especially for someone so young. I think it will stand you in good stead in the years to come. I know things are a bit tough right now, but I have a feeling there are great things to come for you and CCT . . .’
‘Oh, wow,’ I mumbled, feeling quite stunned by such generous feedback.
‘I’m going to help you,’ Charlie declared.
The next day I put Charlie in a taxi back to Phnom Penh. His visit—and his enthusiasm, encouragement and praise—was just the boost I’d needed.
‘I’ll be back again soon,’ he promised me. ‘I’ll bring the whole family next time.’
Then he pulled a card out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was a gold credit card.
‘Pull out a thousand dollars every day and don’t stop until it’s empty,’ he said. ‘You need to stop teaching at the university and focus on CCT. When I get home I’m going to donate enough funds for a salary for you so you can move into a decent house. Your dogs need a yard and you deserve some basic comforts, too. It’s important for the longevity of you and CCT.’
At first, I was almost too gobsmacked to speak. ‘Oh. My. God . . .’ was all I managed to say as I held the card limply in my hand.
Charlie just laughed.
‘Charlie! My goodness!’ Now the words tumbled out of me. ‘I don’t know what to say . . . This is just unbelievable. And amazing. Holy shit!’
Charlie laughed again. ‘You deserve it. Trust me.’
I was still gushing my appreciation as his taxi pulled away.
> Having someone give me such a vote of confidence, just when I had been struggling so badly . . . It was completely transformational. A big wave of adrenaline rushed through me. With that sudden surge of energy, I turned and bolted up the stairs, and proceeded to leap around my little attic like an idiot, much to the delight of Ruby, Rosie and Franky.
As soon as Charlie got back to Australia, he fulfilled his promises. He made an incredibly generous donation to CCT and an ongoing donation that allowed for me to live modestly but comfortably for several months to come and (yippee!) give up my job at the university.
It was like being sprung from prison. My brain started racing with all the things that we needed to do—and that we could do now.
Thanks to Charlie’s sponsorship, and at his suggestion, I moved into a new house with a lot more space and natural light, and with a yard for the dogs. I didn’t have a stick of furniture, so I rattled around the big echoing rooms. But it was definitely more comfortable than the attic.
Carolyn, who had gone quiet since the SMS exchange in Phnom Penh, started sending me regular emails again. Those emails had me bouncing out of bed in the morning so I could send off a reply before heading to CCT. The happiness I got from that crush fuelled me all day long. Every time anything remotely interesting happened, I’d make a mental note to include it in my next email, or use it as an excuse to text her.
Soon we were sending emails and texts back and forth all day and night. Even though I knew there was a risk that she’d shut it down again, I couldn’t help but get swept up in the romance of it all. I was so love-sick I lost my appetite, couldn’t sleep, and in every spare moment was lost in a daydream—I was addicted to that dopamine rush of seeing a message from her pop up on my phone.
About a month after Charlie’s visit, I got an email from an Australian expat named Gerard (‘call me Baz’) Basili. Baz, a pharmacist, was working as a volunteer with the Sihanouk Hospital of Hope in Phnom Penh, educating staff and improving operations at the hospital’s pharmacy. He’d heard about my problems getting decent medical care for the kids from some other expats in Phnom Penh (who I’d met through Charlie). He said that if CCT needed any medical-related assistance, he’d be more than happy to help.