by Tara Winkler
That was a surprise.
Her vivid blue eyes were brimming with compassion. She said: ‘I know how hard this is going to be for you. Stay at my place. I’ve missed you.’
I didn’t stop to think about how confusing she was being, or the complications of getting attached to someone who lived so far away. In that instant, all my resentment fell away.
‘I’ve missed you, too,’ I said.
The Australian Story team had set up a space for the interview in a massive, empty studio at the ABC headquarters in Ultimo, Sydney. There were two chairs floating in the middle of the dark room, with a massive spotlight blaring down on one of them.
Oh boy.
You know how when you’re really dreading something and getting all worked up about it, people around you say things like: ‘It won’t be that bad. It’s never as bad as you think.’
WRONG. It was that bad. It was worse than I thought.
I was like a deer in the headlights. I dodged the eating disorder questions by admitting to experiencing some mild depression. I fumbled over answers that related to any ‘matters of the heart’, and finished most of my sentences with ‘Um, I dunno. I’m sorry.’ I felt like a complete and utter idiot.
It went so badly, the producers had to ask me to do the interview again. They said they’d be able to use some of the footage, but they really needed me to elaborate on the questions I’d baulked at—which were, of course, the hard ones that were going to make me feel exposed and vulnerable by crying on camera.
They seemed to understand that I’d been too nervous to be able to delve into deeply personal questions. They suggested that perhaps I’d be more comfortable in my own home, speaking with a female journalist?
I agreed politely (albeit through gritted teeth), trying to be as helpful as possible.
So we had our last interview in my parents’ living room. Once the cameras were rolling, the journalist started to press me. ‘Tell us about your struggles. How did saving the kids impact on your depression? Did helping them help you, too?’
Sure enough, I ended up in tears . . . so I guess they got the emotion they were looking for.
Thanks goodness I had Carolyn. She was an incredible support throughout, meeting my fear and anxiety with limitless empathy, warmth and kindness.
We spent every spare moment together in those few weeks in Sydney. I did ask her about Chris, and it was complicated. But I was just happy to be with her. I thought she was the most wonderful thing on earth.
The day before I left for Cambodia, we went and sat on a grassy knoll overlooking Sydney’s Bondi Beach, watching as the waves crashed up over the rocks. All I could think was how much I loved her and how much I was dreading saying goodbye.
Then the words just fell out of my mouth. ‘I love you,’ I said, then winced, fearing I’d ruined the moment.
She smiled. ‘I love you, too,’ she said, leaning in to kiss me. ‘The long-distance thing will be a bit tough, but there’s no denying how I feel about you.’
I could hardly believe it. Carolyn Shine, the most beautiful woman I had ever known, had chosen me. I felt like the luckiest, and happiest, person alive.
I flew back to Cambodia the next morning, still basking in the glow of Carolyn’s love, and feeling immense relief that the interviews were over.
We were looking at a few months’ respite before the documentary went to air. I had lots of work to get on with to make sure we were ready for what would hopefully be a new influx of support.
The most important task was finding a pathway for CCT to move all of the kids into family-based care. But how would we do that? How would we ensure that all their basic needs were still met, when the reason they were separated from their families in the first place was because of a lack of access to those basic needs? How would we ensure they still had access to the best education and nutrition and healthcare, while addressing all the many complicated issues that result in—and from—intergenerational poverty?
On top of this, things were changing in Battambang. There was a growing concern in the community about the number of gangs of little kids who roamed the streets all day. When I first arrived in Battambang in 2007, I generally only saw kids sniffing glue late at night around the White Rose restaurant and the riverfront area. By early 2010, the numbers appeared to have grown substantially. And the kids seemed to be getting younger, too.
These kids were at great risk of being trafficked, subjected to abuse or ending up in orphanages.
I had a stroke of luck when, not long after I returned to Battambang, I went to a birthday gathering at the Balcony Bar and met an American woman in her forties named Barbara.
Barbara and I became instant friends. It was surprising, really, as she was a Christian missionary and I’m, well . . . let’s just say I’m the polar opposite of that. But we shared a dry, cynical sense of humour. We fell into a deep conversation and we soon found that, despite our differing thoughts on religion, we were striving for quite similar goals—particularly when it came to keeping Cambodian children with their families.
Barbara had been in Cambodia for four years, working with kids and families in the AIDS wing at the military hospital in Battambang. She had also been working with families living in the Battambang slums. We got talking about the serious lack of support for the children and families in those slum communities.
Like me, Barbara had been alarmed to see the number of ‘street kids’ in the local area steadily increasing. These kids weren’t homeless, though tourists might be told otherwise. They had families, but the families were generally a bit dysfunctional. Because the parents couldn’t provide adequate support, the kids had to support themselves. So instead of going to school, they begged on the streets and picked through trash for recycling to sell, usually barefoot and dressed in rags. Sniffing glue killed the hunger pangs—it also evoked sympathy from concerned tourists. Therein lies the paradox of giving (money, food, milk powder or gifts) to begging children: it doesn’t help them; it just encourages them to keep begging in high-risk environments, engaging in harmful behaviours like glue sniffing and not going to school.
Barbara and I both agreed that something needed to be done to prevent the problem of Battambang’s street kids from getting even further out of hand. We decided to meet with Jedtha so we could put our heads together and see if we could come up with a possible solution.
I was also secretly hoping Barbara could help us figure out that pathway to reintegrating CCT’s kids into family-based care. She was certainly just as convinced as I was of its benefits.
The slums in Cambodia are dismal places—makeshift villages of tiny corrugated-iron huts, with no running water or sewage systems. Many householders struggle with mental health issues, substance abuse problems, alcoholism, domestic violence and gambling addictions—the legacy of generation after generation trapped in an unending cycle of poverty.
The children born into these communities suffer terribly. The kids we were seeing on the streets were underweight and malnourished, often covered in infected sores, riddled with head lice and scabies. Their hair was often straw-like, patchy and bleached of colour due to malnutrition, and their mouths were full of rotten teeth.
After much thought and debate, Jedtha and I decided to team up with Barbara to launch CCT’s first community youth centre for these kids. Our vision was that it would be a place kids could go to access many of the things that weren’t accessible to poor families living in slum communities.
We would enrol the kids in their local public school and help their families cover the costs associated with their education like uniforms, pens and pencils, school bags and textbooks. We’d also run supplementary education programs at the centre, and provide nutritious meals, clean drinking water, and access to the shower and bathroom facilities that these kids didn’t have at their homes in the slums.
By building these relationships, we’d be able to provide counselling, social work support and medical treatment to the kids and th
eir families, and assist the parents with vocational training and access to employment opportunities.
But the most important aspect of the community youth centre would be that these kids would still be going home to their families every afternoon.
We knew that if the project was going to be a success, it had to be in a location that the kids could easily access. So when a small space in the heart of town came up for rent, we decided it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
We had some funds to cover the set-up, but not for the ongoing operations. But it would be a low-cost project to run, compared to the CCT orphanage, and while we didn’t know what the response would be to the Australian Story episode, we were fairly confident we’d bring in enough to cover the ongoing operational costs.
We recruited a brilliant Cambodian social worker to run the centre. After it opened, two boys who were heavy glue sniffers started to come regularly. They stopped sniffing glue, cleaned themselves up and brought in their friends, other ‘street kids’, to check the place out.
In the months that followed, we had sixty street kids, then seventy and then eighty, until they were filling the alleyway that ran alongside the community youth centre.
The day the Australian Story episode ‘Children of a Lesser God’ went to air, I was in a state very close to catatonic terror.
It was Easter Monday 2010 and about mid-afternoon in Cambodia. Barbara and I were in Phnom Penh at the time, and I had no intention of actually watching the episode, but Barbara persuaded me to at least try to sit through it. She coaxed me into going to the Java Cafe to access the wifi, so we could watch via a Skype connection with my parents.
I spent the whole time with my head buried behind her back, too horrified to watch. Occasionally I’d stick my head up to see what was going on, but as soon as I heard the sound of my own voice, I’d squeal, clap my hands over my ears and dive for cover again. The other patrons in the cafe must have thought I was bonkers. Even the few seconds I did see were beyond cringe-worthy. I still can’t watch it.
I was terrified of what other people would think of me, of being judged by the masses—but, of course, my harshest critic turned out to be me.
The response from the Australian public was impossibly kind. And I say ‘impossibly’ because there’s no way any human being could live up to the sorts of things people said about me. The online donations flooded in so quickly that the website fell over for twenty minutes, nearly giving us all a heart attack.
We found out later that 933,000 viewers watched the episode that night.
We all spent the following weeks in the throes of what Peter called ‘a crisis of good fortune’. We were not really set up administratively to manage such a massive influx of donations and correspondence. In a matter of days, we had a backlog of over a thousand emails, and they just kept flooding in through the months that followed.
Everyone worked their butts off trying to answer all the emails, respond to all the donation queries, and set up appropriate systems to ensure we were keeping track of it all. It was total madness. It took us nearly a whole year to work through that tidal wave of correspondence.
The response from my peers back in Cambodia wasn’t quite so positive . . .
At the time the Australian Story documentary was filmed, the problems with orphanages in the developing world were not widely known, so none of us thought to include the work we were already doing to reunite siblings and to support families in the thirty-minute program.
But in 2011, a MoSVY/UNICEF report was published. It was called, With the Best Intentions: A study of attitudes towards residential care in Cambodia. The study brought to light just how big and deep all these problems were. The facts that it revealed were shocking.
It found that in a five-year period from 2005 to 2010, the number of orphanages in Cambodia had increased by 75 per cent, and the number of children being institutionalised had nearly doubled. This is despite the fact that the number of actual orphans in Cambodia had fallen over the same period. The report found that over 80 per cent of children living in orphanages in Cambodia were not orphans, in the traditional sense, but children from poor families. This was the first time I became fully aware of the extent of the problems I had been witnessing up close.
The next shock came when I found out what has been driving this rise in orphanages . . . in fact, it’s the main thing that’s incentivising the boom in orphanages across the developing world . . .
It’s us. The supporters. The donors. The tourists and the gap year backpackers. The well-meaning foreigners from around the world who are unwittingly turning good intentions into a profitable industry.
We are providing the funds and support for these orphanages, which enables more of them to open. To fill these orphanages, more and more children are being separated from their families and institutionalised unnecessarily. It was awful to realise that the laws of supply and demand could apply so widely to the business of orphanages.
This problem isn’t just confined to Cambodia; J.K. Rowling’s organisation Lumos estimates that there are at least eight million children around the world living in institutions. Over 90 per cent of these children have parents or extended family members who could care for them, if they had access to the right support.
Lumos has also reported that young adults raised in these institutions are ten times more likely to become involved in prostitution than their peers, forty times more likely to have a criminal record and five hundred times more likely to take their own lives.
Support for orphanages in developing countries is garnered in many different ways, but there’s little doubt that the growth in the number of orphanages in Cambodia is correlated with the increase in tourism. One of the main ways the orphanage industry generates funding is via orphanage tourism and voluntourism.
‘Orphanage tourism’ refers to visiting a residential care facility while on holiday, and ‘voluntourism’ describes the popular practice of incorporating a short-term volunteer stint as part of a holiday itinerary.
Many orphanages charge for these visits and volunteer stints, or otherwise use them to evoke sympathy from foreigners who will then be moved to donate. The kids are often used to sing and dance, befriend and plead with visitors in order to generate donations. Dodgy and corrupt orphanages will take this even further by deliberately keeping the children in terrible conditions in order to shock visitors, who are then so heartbroken by what they see they are compelled to donate to the kids they believe to be most in need of help—just as I was back in 2005 when I first visited SKO.
These dodgy orphanages are run as businesses in which children are the commodities and donations are embezzled by corrupt orphanage staff. Too often, even goods that are donated to the children (rice, shoes, toys or clothes) are resold after the donors have left. Which is what happened to many of the goods I donated to SKO.
One of the problems here is that, for the majority of well-meaning travellers, visiting an orphanage doesn’t seem inherently bad. There’s no obvious negative impact, which is why so many people, including myself, have fallen into the trap.
The actual experience feels like this: A few nice people visit an orphanage, trying to do their bit to help; they have a nice day, the kids have a nice day, and everybody’s happy. Where’s the problem?
You can see the problem when you scale it up. When thousands of well-meaning people visit orphanages year after year, trying to do their bit to help, what gets created is an industry that exploits children in order to make money. In a country where corruption is rife, vulnerable children are everywhere, and affluent, well-intentioned visitors are (naturally) keen to help—the opportunity for exploitation is enormous.
As well as fuelling an industry that tears families apart, orphanage tourism also creates serious child protection risks. Even though the vast majority of people visiting orphanages are kind people who would never dream of hurting a child, the fact remains that not all people are well-meaning and sex tourism is still a se
rious issue in developing countries like Cambodia. Orphanage tourists, the good and the bad, are mostly not properly vetted, and are given opportunities to interact with kids in an intimate way—for example, playing games, riding the school bus together, hugs and other activities that allow for physical interaction.
Just think about how you might feel in the same situation. What if busloads of tourists were regularly allowed to visit schools, preschools or day-care centres in your home town? What if, on these visits, these tourists were allowed to play and interact with your child?
It comes down to the fact that children are not tourist attractions. They are not animals in a petting zoo and they are certainly not there for the entertainment of tourists and travellers. We don’t visit vulnerable children’s homes when we’re on holiday in Australia, the US or the UK—so why do we feel it’s appropriate when we’re on holiday in a developing country? This wasn’t a question I asked myself when I first agreed to go on a little tour of the local orphanages with Chan back in 2005. But it is a question I ponder a lot today . . .
Orphanage tourism and voluntourism both create serious issues for vulnerable children, but there are some additional problems with voluntourism that are also important to understand.
I am not suggesting that all volunteering is bad, if the definition of volunteering is simply ‘doing work for little to no remuneration’. Volunteering in a developing county can be truly life-changing. For many people, it sparks a lifelong commitment to work in the field of social justice. There are skill shortages in many developing countries, especially in Cambodia, where the holocaust had a devastating impact on the knowledge-base held by Cambodian people. Highly skilled and qualified professionals can certainly help by sharing their knowledge and training local people, building their capacity so they are better able to provide quality services. In this way, we are not taking jobs away from local people, but helping them to become even more employable.