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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.
