There is an alternative

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In recent years I have become concerned that High school groups have been visiting Cambodia and spending significant time, or all their time, in orphanages ‘helping’ – playing with the kids, teaching English, and do work tasks like painting and building. 

The overall impression they get of Cambodia and Cambodian kids is very limited.  The vast majority of children in Cambodia live with their parents, extended family and community. To spend any time in an orphanage or children’s home is harmful to both the kids living there (attachment disorders and other psychological issues in the children are exacerbated) and those visiting (who develop misunderstandings about appropriate responses to poverty and disadvantage).

Trips to many other countries by Australian school groups never include visiting orphanages. When a school group goes to Europe, for example, the emphasis is language, history and culture. But rather than coming to learn these same things in Cambodia they so often follow the well-trod pathway of volun-tourism and orphanage tourism. It is easy to do, and is encouraged by the orphanage managers for whom a constant stream of visitors amuses the kids, gets a few jobs done around the property and the volunteers, emotionally moved by being with the kids, will often leave money with the managers before they depart.

Of course the volunteers are doing what seems needed and with the best intentions. But it is not all about them. It should be all about the kids in orphanages and Children’s homes and it is clear visiting such places anywhere in the world does harm to the most vulnerable kids of all.

In Cambodia, if you build an orphanage you will fill it, not with orphans but with kids from poor families sent for a “better life”. But what kind of life is it away from mum and dad, family and friends? (See website on institutional care issues internationally)

There is an alternative. Emmaus Christian College from South Australia have recently visited Vietnam and Cambodia and focused on history and social justice. During their time in Cambodia they have learnt Khmer language each day, learnt from key members of the ‘emerging’ civil society in Cambodia, and sat with young people deeply committed to empowering the youth of Cambodia to find their voice and bring change to a country desperately in need of transformation from within. In the process the students from Australia have been changed and challenged in many ways. When Cambodian people heard the students were learning ‘their language’ each day they were surprised and often asked “but why are they learning our language when they are only here 10 days? When they realized that the programme was to ‘learn’ rather than ‘help’, and to ‘engage and understand’ they were impressed.

So, Australian educators, please re-think what you do when you send a group of your students to poor countries to ‘experience’ poverty and ‘serve’ the poor.  There is damage done to those you meet and your own kids get a warped view of both themselves and their place in the world. There is an alternative.

Orphanages - an Aussie reflects

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When I was a kid growing up during the 1970’s in Blackwood, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, I remember regularly passing Colebrook Home.  We all understood the Aboriginal kids there didn’t have parents or family and they had been brought to the city for education  – it was an orphanage.

Years later, in the mid 1990’s, I was involved in a coalition of community groups that supported Indigenous and migrant people. I met some of the women who had grown up in Colebrook and I discovered that in fact the kids weren’t orphans but actually taken as part of what is now called the Stolen Generation. I remember the release of the Bringing Them Home report in Adelaide when Ron Wilson spoke so passionately about what the inquiry had found.

For me the news that those kids in Colebrook had been taken and were not orphans at all was staggering.  That a ‘well meaning’ collaboration between government policy and church agencies had led to this terrible outcome of kids taken from their family and community was terribly disturbing.

Fast forward to Cambodia in the 2000s and we have a another ‘well meaning’ activity also damaging kids. That is taking kids from their families and communities and putting them into institutions (not by Government policy but often through pressure and guilt laid on parents facing abject poverty).  At a time when the number of orphans in Cambodia is decreasing (due to a better economic situation generally and a decrease in the number of deaths from AIDS over the last 15 years), the number of children’s homes is increasing.

There are lots of Christians involved. For the Cambodians running an orphanage it can be a means of bringing in money from overseas and is often a good income source for pastors and churches struggling for funds. For International people a children’s home is a relatively easy thing to set up and run and you surround yourself with a whole lot of dependent kids who ‘love’ (need) you. It’s a good feeling.  It’s also a great place to have short term teams visit – church and school groups.

How will this be seen in the future? Will there be a ‘Bringing them Home’ report on this era in Cambodia and mission activities of this kind around the globe?

And now there is the Royal commission into Child Abuse in Institutions that is looking into the terrible suffering of kids in Australian orphanages last century. 

There are many Australians involved in orphanages and children’s homes here in Cambodia. Many of them are Christians.  Are we doing to Cambodian kids what we did to our own in a previous generation?  Taking them from families and putting them in institutions. We should be the most sensitive nationality to this issue.  And yet we may be the most involved nationality of all.

Why am I writing about this? I’m an Australian. I’m an International mission leader in Cambodia at this time. I remember the kids in Colebrook Home.  And tonight there are thousands of kids in orphanages in Cambodia most of whom have a home, a family and a community.

God have mercy on us all.

Check out this article from the Age and this website of Children in Families an NGO developing alternatives to institutionalisation in Cambodia.  Also a bit about Colebrook Home and the Bringing them Home Report.  Also check out the Sky Project at ICC here in Phnom Penh.