by Tara Winkler
I knew that orphanages weren’t good. But I think that on some level I was still hoping that the kids who were genuine orphans could grow up to be healthy, happy people if we made CCT the best orphanage it could be.
But Anna was saying that attachment disorders were created by the mere fact of living in an institution—not just by abuse.
The staff were paid to be there. They had to go home everyday to attend to their own families, their own lives. It wasn’t humanly possible for them to have the dedication of a real family. The mere fact there was a different adult coming on to the shift every eight hours meant that the kids couldn’t attach properly. And staff come and go—employee turnover is a reality of the workplace. But even if I lived full time at CCT and never had to come and go myself, it just wasn’t possible to properly parent that many kids. One person just cannot adequately hold the role of the sole stable adult in the lives of dozens of children.
Anna kept talking but my mind was elsewhere now. How would I fix this? How could we give each of the kids the family they deserved? They should never have been taken away from their families in the first place.
And that was the big tragedy in all of this. We were always talking about ‘the CCT family’, but most of these kids already had families. Even the kids who had lost both their parents might have had aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or older brothers and sisters who could have looked after them if they’d had a little help.
Naturally, I’m only human and I did of course feel tempted to get defensive, but there was no time to indulge it. I knew by now that being defensive never serves any good purpose. I just had to get busy finding a way to solve these problems . . .
STEP 3
Do something better
18
‘Orphanage’ is a label that can be extremely deceptive. Given that children are being placed into orphanages because of poverty and not because they’re orphaned, the label ‘orphanage’ is not really accurate for many of the institutions that use it. Today, ‘orphanage’ is just a euphemistic term given to a widely used model of residential care—that is, care that children receive in an institutional setting by paid staff, rather than by their own immediate or extended family members, or other family-based carers such as foster carers.
There are various terms used to refer to residential care for children, including orphanages, children’s homes, boarding schools, children’s villages, safe houses, rehabilitation centres and shelters, to name just a few.
Residential care is problematic when the parent–child bond is severed unnecessarily and when it is seen as a permanent solution.
Of course, sometimes, residential care might truly be necessary. If a child isn’t safe at home, and if all possible opportunities for kinship care have been exhausted, the child may need to be placed in residential care. But this should be the absolute last resort, not the first. And in these situations, trained professionals should be working with the family to empower them to work through their problems until they can take back the responsibility of providing non-violent, safe and loving care to their children. And in the few cases where there definitely aren’t any other alternatives, placing a child in residential care should still only be a temporary measure until a permanent family-based care solution can be found—through family reunification, local adoption or long-term foster care.
In short, no matter what the circumstances, research has shown that family-based care, including parental care, kinship care, foster care or local adoption, is always better than caring for children in an institutional setting.
Some institutions will use deceptive labels in an attempt to avoid negative connotations and simply call themselves a ‘family’. But just because you call an institution a family, doesn’t make it one.
In our one-on-one sessions, Anna naturally slipped into the role of counsellor. She could see that I was still really hurting over the accusations and threats the staff had made while I was in Australia. We had a lot of long talks about it during the week she spent with us.
Together, we pondered the differences between Australian and Cambodian culture. I told her my theory that the cultural faux pas I’d committed, combined with amateurish leadership, may have been a catalyst to the fallout.
She suggested that also, in Cambodia, life is all about attending to the social hierarchy, being respectful of your elders and focusing on ‘the greater good’—meaning family and community. The sociological reasons for this are obviously complex. People have a lot of theories about why there are such differences between ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ thinking. Maybe it comes down to religion, or climate, or economic development or agricultural practices. Maybe it’s just life in a fairly rural community. Whatever the reasons, these differences meant that, in the staff ’s eyes, ‘good’ children should be sweet, meek and obedient. Because my point of view was naturally quite ‘western’, I valued individuality. I wanted the kids to be confident and brave enough to go against the grain. I wanted to see them come out of their shells and stand up for themselves and what they believed in. It was no wonder we’d clashed.
‘Honestly Tara, you do need to reconnect with the staff,’ Anna told me. ‘If you want to achieve any of the things we’ve discussed, it’s going to take teamwork. You’ve got to stop working through Jedtha and get everyone united. I can see you have the capacity to be a good leader. Don’t let pride get in the way of that.’
It took a little while to accept this, but I knew she was right. We had so much work ahead of us, I had to find a way to forgive the staff and trust them again, and give them reasons to trust me in return. I wasn’t sure if the staff would accept me back in a leadership role, but I had to give it a shot.
A week or so after Anna had returned to England, she sent me her official report, with all her observations and recommendations.
While there was nothing in the report we hadn’t discussed in person, seeing our erroneous ways printed in black and white wasn’t the best feeling in the world.
First, our child protection practices needed strengthening—we were allowing un-vetted visitors and volunteers to interact with the kids, we weren’t following adequate safety procedures when it came to the kids travelling in vehicles (we were just following cultural norms, but I could see her point), we let them play in the yard with the gate open and with safety hazards like open water urns and coconut trees around, the list went on . . .
The next issue was that our social work practices were not up to standard—our case file management was poor, we didn’t have a safe reporting system in place for the kids to confidentially report complaints or concerns, we didn’t have professional supervision for our social workers, and we were working too independently of DoSVY.
Anna urged us to strengthen the communication between staff to allow for better teamwork, and to try to foster a family atmosphere at CCT as much as possible.
She did write many really lovely, glowing things about CCT. She praised our commitment to providing a well-rounded education, the gentleness and enthusiasm of the staff, the encouraging move towards sibling reunion and family support, the commitment to healthcare, the weekly excursions and the balance of time spent studying versus playing.
She also wrote: Tara’s ability to reflect on her own role within CCT and to be open to feedback is one of her great strengths and supports her in being flexible and open to change and improvement.
I hoped I could live up to that description.
In the weeks that followed, Jedtha and I pushed forward, trying to work out how to put Anna’s recommendations into practice. Her report and the principles she taught us became our new blueprint for running CCT.
But even though we were working to make CCT the best it could be, finding out that even the ‘best’ institutional care can create attachment disorders haunted me. I tracked down some of the research that Anna mentioned to try to better understand the problem.
Everything I learned just confirmed my worst fears. Growing up in an insti
tution, deprived of loving parental care, has been shown to impair the development of a child’s brain and can lead to growth and speech delays, higher incidences of hyperactivity, difficulties forming relationships in adulthood, clinical personality disorders and an impaired ability to re-enter society later in life.
When you compounded all of this with the fact that orphanages tore apart families and didn’t help at all to break the cycle of poverty . . . then what were we doing here? What was the point in trying to make CCT the best orphanage it could be? It would still, fundamentally, be an institution.
The fact was, the kids needed to grow up in loving and supportive families—not inside the walls of an institution. We needed to reunite them with their own families, or otherwise find ways to support them in family-based care.
Realising that this was the only way forward was an incredibly daunting idea. It meant giving up every picture we’d had in our heads of what CCT should look like: the eco-village idea was out, even creating a ‘family atmosphere’ at CCT wasn’t going to cut it.
The biggest, most daunting obstacle was that Cambodian families who gave up their kids did so because of poverty. It would be an enormous undertaking to find ways to help them keep their kids or take their kids back. It was going to take time, money and a big serving of humble pie for me.
Basically, we had to change the whole model of CCT and, in doing that, admit that the way we had been doing it all this time was a mistake. How was I going to explain that to our donors?
They had signed up to support an orphanage. We had been telling them that CCT was a really great orphanage. Now I had to tell them that even good orphanages aren’t good for kids. Would they still want to support CCT? Or would they withdraw their funding? Would changing the model mean the end of CCT?
But despite the risks inherent in changing direction, the best interests of the kids had to come first. We’d just have to make the changes slowly and carefully and make sure all of our supporters came along on the journey with us. We’d have to take baby steps and communicate the new direction well. We certainly weren’t going to be able to transform CCT overnight.
The good news was that a lot of what we were doing was already on track—bringing siblings together, the small amount of family support we were already providing, and not taking in more children who already had family. These were all very positive steps.
But oh my god. There was still an incomprehensible amount of work to do.
We drafted up our first attempt at a strategic plan and moved forward with a project that we called our Family Reunification Program.
We needed to do proper family tracing for all the kids and then conduct risk assessments on their families to see if it would be safe for the kids to go back to living with them. Then we’d need to work out how the kids could continue to access decent healthcare and education . . .
We decided that Amara, Chanlina, Maly and Teng should be the first to begin the reintegration process. Having met their parents the day we visited them at Prachea Thorm, we knew they were good candidates—they were kind-hearted people who adored their children. So we raised some funds to rent a modest house for the family in Battambang and to set the parents up with a small food stall business. The kids could then move back in with their parents and CCT could continue to support their healthcare and education. And if the business went well enough, the parents could begin covering these costs themselves.
It sounded simple enough—but the challenge of life in Cambodia is that just when you think you have a handle on something, it’ll turn around in a totally unexpected way and you’ll be left back at square one.
While I was busy thanking donors for the wonderful support they were offering to bring this family back together, the kids came to me to tell me they didn’t want to move back in with their parents after all.
‘Tara, CCT is our home now. We haven’t lived with our parents for a long time. We hardly even know them anymore. Please don’t make us go!’
Oh man, I thought to myself, looking at the appeal in their eyes. There was no way in the world I was going to send them away from the place they felt was their home and have them experience even more abandonment.
This family-based care thing was going to be even more complicated than I’d expected.
When we’re young and idealistic, we’re prone to seeing the world in black and white:
‘These people must be terrible because they trafficked their kids/ their kids are picking through garbage/working as beggars/not going to school etc.’
Actually no, many of these families are simply living in desperate poverty and have no other options.
‘Orphanages, even the good ones, are bad for kids. Let’s reintegrate them back to their biological families!’
Actually, sometimes, after living apart from family for so long, the kids are hesitant to go back. Or sometimes there’s no high school back in their home village so the parents want their kids to stay and get a good education.
Nothing is black and white. When a family is broken apart, it’s not easy to put it back together again. The parts don’t fit anymore. That’s why it’s so important that, wherever possible, we keep kids with their families in the first place.
I knew that reintegrating the kids against their will wasn’t going to result in good outcomes for anyone involved. And I needed the kids to feel safe, so I informed the donors of the hiccup and let it drop until I could work out what to do next.
Today, the CCT team know how to conduct reintegration professionally, safely and effectively. We follow MoSVY’s Policy on the Alternative Care for Children and we have a long, careful process for reintegration.
First we conduct family tracing—a process of locating the children’s biological family through discussions with commune leaders, neighbours, other known relatives and the children themselves.
The next step is to conduct a number of risk assessments and family assessments to work out if the family can provide a safe and stable environment for the kids. Then, in consultation with the children and the family, we create a case plan that outlines the most practical steps for reintegration.
Then it’s time for the kids to slowly get to know their family again, typically through short, supervised weekend visits, accompanied by their social worker. Over time, those visits tend to naturally extend to full days and then to overnight stays.
After the kids feel comfortable spending the weekends with their family and can see that nothing else in their lives has changed, they usually decide that they’d like to move back permanently. Our social work team are responsible for conducting this process, alongside DoSVY, the local commune leaders and village leaders. We always let the process be guided by the kids and their families. And, thankfully, it does work.
In more recent years, Amara, Chanlina, Maly and Teng were successfully reintegrated back with their family in Battambang. Sadly, their father passed away due to a long battle with diabetes, but their mother is doing well, working as an assistant at CCT’s preschool. Maly is studying nursing at university, and Teng, Amara and Chanlina are still in high school, acing all their exams.
Interestingly, one of the barriers that initially stopped those kids from wanting to move back with their family was because—as you may have guessed already—the standard of living at CCT really was ‘too high’.
Yep, those video games, cable TV and personal devices, and that endless supply of donated clothes and toys, came back to haunt me. These things can be enough to prevent a successful reintegration.
The unrealistic living standards in ‘good orphanages’ set children up for a big shock when it comes time for them to transition into independence. Most of the time, they cannot possibly sustain the same quality of life they were used to without the ongoing support of the organisation. This creates a culture of dependency and, as a result, the children resist reintegrating back into society or back into their families.
By striving to give the kids the same privileged childhood t
hat I’d been so fortunate to have, I created even more problems for them. I just hadn’t taken the time to fully understand the negative impacts these actions might have had in a completely different economic and cultural setting.
19
Not long after Anna’s visit to CCT, we had to start thinking about how to occupy the kids during the Khmer New Year holiday in April.
These days we run an educational holiday program at CCT, but back in early 2009 we thought it sounded like a great idea when one of our donors offered to fund a holiday trip for the kids. We picked out a few options and had a big meeting with all the staff and kids to vote on a location. The majority decided that they’d like to see the famous Bou Sra waterfalls in Mondulkiri, a province in far north-east Cambodia.
I had heard about the beautiful, untouched forested landscapes, the windswept valleys and the cooler climate of Mondulkiri and was keen to check it out myself. I figured that we could make the trip an educational experience and teach the kids about the importance of wildlife conservation and protecting the environment. So I wrote to the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri and asked if we could visit while we were there.
The Elephant Valley Project was set up by a British guy named Jack Highwood to help rehabilitate captive, working Asian elephants in Cambodia. Elephants are still used for transportation, logging, hunting and tourism, especially in the more sparsely populated north-eastern provinces. The trouble is, a lot of elephant husbandry knowledge was lost with the Khmer Rouge and the rapid changes happening in Cambodian society.
The project’s 650-hectare sanctuary is now a place where these elephants can go for medical treatment, rest and recuperation, and retirement. Retired elephants are slowly rehabilitated back to the natural jungle habitat that’s being conserved within the sanctuary.