The Boom of Cambodia’s Orphanage Tourism
Take a look at this site and all of its photos:http://www.thomascristofoletti.com/portfolios/the-boom-of-the-orphanage-tourism-in-cambodia/
“During the daytime, tourists flock to the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. They tour the ancient temples while sipping fresh coconuts and pose for a photo in front of the trees that have overgrown the world heritage site for centuries. In the evening, however, the area offers little entertainment, and so many tourists opt to visit one of the hundreds of orphanages that have sprouted up over the past years to see children perform traditional dances.
Donations are made to buy food, toys and school books for the children, but most of the money is filling the coffers of the founders and managers.
Since the days of the genocidal Khmer Rouge Regime and the following civil war, which ended in the early 90′s, the number of orphans steadily decrease. The number of orphanages, however, kept increasing, and the majority of children living in orphanages – more than 70 percent – has at least one remaining parent.
Due to the generosity of tourists who want to help the still impoverished nation and the most vulnerable Cambodians, orphanages have become a lucrative, multimillion-dollar business model, and tourists are tricked into believing that they are helping real orphans.”
REFORM Puzzle Piece
I burned at the line “…In many organizations, the best way to keep donations going on, is to keep the children at a substandard level in order to show donants how critical their help is to the orphanage…”
That’s kind of the way Mother Teresa worked, also. The sight of a needy child touches us all on a deep level, and we tend to give money uncritically when a child is involved.
Reece’s Rainbow knows this principle well– that’s why they show all those illegally-obtained photographs on their site. All the PAPs crowdfunding their adoptions can use these images to drive donations. The adoption agencies approve because such panhandling allows them to set prices skyhigh without worrying about charging more than the market will bear.
It’s a tidy little system that benefits everyone– except the kids being cared for in deliberately “substandard” conditions, far from their real families. 🙁