Last week I wrote a blog post complaining about volunteer sending organizations trying to “sell” their 17 year old volunteers to NGO organizations.  I then got a very well written response from 16 year old Naya Herman who is considering volunteering abroad and so I decided to answer her two questions in two new blog posts. Here is the first of two posts.
—-

Let’s start with the question about aid organizations “keeping themselves in business”.  Unfortunately, there are way more cases than I would like to see of NGO’s being a way for people to make money and sustain their lifestyles rather than focus on actually doing good (the recent case of an NGO “working” in Cambodia and founded by a NYer which was revealed to have paid the founder and his travel expenses for years but yet had spent no money in Cambodia is one example) – but that is not really what I was talking about.  People clearly choosing corrupt actions using an NGO as a farce is indeed something we see here, but I am also referring to organizations, much like PEPY, who started out small and then started to grow.  At a point, like we are at now with PEPY with our 35 local staff, you grow to a stage where you have many staff members and the cost to keep them employed as well as your office costs, etc, becomes substantial.  If you lose funding, it is then not only your programs that might stop, but people might lose their jobs, so what you sometimes see in those situations is that the NGO scrambles for funding.  Sometimes they take on work that is outside the scope of their mission or skills in order to get funding to stay afloat, or sometimes they focus less on program improvements while focusing more on bringing funds for overhead.

Organizations should be working themselves out of a job, right?  If their stated mission is to ensure that all children in their county have access to health education, they should be working towards a day when they are no longer needed.  If there comes a point where the goals become to difficult to achieve or the focus of the mission is actually achieved, it is rare to see an NGO call it a day, fire all of their employees, and shut down. They instead move on to something new, yes, it could be in large part to continue to do good in new areas, but it typically is also in large part to keep their own organization going.

In the case of these middle-men volunteer sending organizations I was writing about (some of them being non-profit and some for-profit, though in reality it does not matter how you are registered as you can do great work and poor work on either side of the legal bridge), when THEY have employees and overhead, especially if there overhead is in more expensive parts of the world in which to do business (as many of them are), then they have a LOT of incentive to “sell” these trips. They NEED to sell these gap year service programs in order to make enough money to pay themselves, and some of them, it seems to me, are more concerned with selling a product to make a profit than they are with matching skills with needs, properly vetting NGO partners, ensuring that the community partners are properly benefiting from the relationships, etc.

Does that make sense?

For the most part, my life in Cambodia is not nearly as “exotic” as people living in cities like Chicago and Cleveland might think it is. I ride my bike around our small town, I work in an office with cement walls (though of course the lack of air-conditioning and high temperatures can make it interesting at times), and I order the same things at the restaurant at the end of my road.

Overall, though, things are pretty easy here, unlike what many think. Take, for example, the time I broke a pair of sunglasses. Actually broke them—snapped the frame in two. In the US I could have spent money to send them somewhere where they would inevitably get lost or I would get told it would cost more to fix them than to buy new ones, and I’d be lucky if I saw them again in a few months. Here, I walk to the end of the road and for 6 and a quarter cents someone welds them together for me in less than a minute.

Our bio-diesel truck broke the other day. The number of parts we needed to replace would mean considering the car totaled in the US. It cost us less than $400 to fix the truck and fix it well.

Overall, it is pretty easy to get things done here. Life is not “hard”.

But then random things happen, like the time an ant colony set up house inside my computer and my screen went black as hundreds of little ants emerged between the keys. The man at the computer shop who fixed it said, “Oh, that again. Ants ate your motherboard too?”  Turns out he was able to fix the computer for a few dollars with a quick clean of the computer innards, and tada! I was back typing away, ant-free, in no time.

Then more difficult stuff happens that makes you depressed, annoyed, angry about being here. . . and all of the rest of the “ease” of living in Cambodia doesn’t seem all that easy any more. A few weeks ago, when I was staying in Phnom Penh with a group of teachers who were visiting Cambodia to learn about development issues, I woke up, and my phone as gone, as were two other phones from the other instructors staying the room. Someone had stolen our phones WHILE we were sleeping. Yikes!

I ran downstairs in my pajamas, upset that I would be losing the phone number I had had for 5 years and feeling strange that someone had been in my room while I was sleeping. I told the men behind the desk that I assumed it was someone with the key to our room, as I know I had locked the door, and they set about trying to find out what happened.

It turns out the guesthouse had video surveillance, and the person who had picked the lock was the prostitute staying with the older Australian man across the hall. When the staff came to knock on the door to try to get the phones back, the Aussie said, “She stole phones?!” then turned to her and said, “That is disgusting.” Too bad we were all too flustered by the situation to tell him that HE was disgusting.

The poor girl. Ugh—it broke my heart. She was clearly not a professional thief, or she wouldn’t have walked over two laptop computers before stealing our cheap and old phones. She let me come into the room and asked everyone else to leave and then gave me back our phones, while crying and holding my feet, saying she was supposed to leave that day to see her sick mother and she needed the money and she was so, so sorry. Sobbing. Both of us. Broke my heart. I told them not to arrest her. The hotel did anyway when she went downstairs. She won’t get a fair trial. It’s Cambodia afterall, and life here ISN’T easy for most. You can buy whatever you want: a computer cleaning, glasses fixing, ANYTHING. . . IF you have the money. If you don’t you will sit in jail, because you tried to steal a phone to get some cash to see your mother. And the man who bought you, the guy who has all the choices in the world, sits there, takes out cash to give to you (as he has been with you for the last few days and owes you money), and then puts the cash back into his wallet and says, “You have been a bad, bad girl for stealing their things!” and walks away.

It’s a pretty freakin’ hard place to live afterall.

I recently wrote a piece about PEPY Tours on World Nomad’s website.  I am reposting it below as it relates to a lot of the themes of this blog: Responsible Giving, voluntourism, Cambodia, etc

Fast Five Profile: PEPY Tours

One of the PEPY riders on her bike for Cambodian based PEPY Tours

1. Who are you?  Brief description of trips you offer

Daniela Papi, Director, PEPY and PEPY Tours.

PEPY Tours offers educational tours where travelers have the chance to learn about development issues and support programs committed to making change even long after the travelers leave.  Our tours of Cambodia and neighboring areas range from bicycle trips and high-end educational adventures to service-learning programs for school groups. The required donation portion of our tour fee supports the ongoing educational programs of our partner non-profit organizations.

2.  How do you define Responsible Travel?

Responsible Travel is a conscious and educated approach to tourism which incorporates learning about and supporting local initiatives and goals in the areas we visit. If we have limited knowledge about an area, it is very difficult to make the most responsible decisions, so the most important aspects of responsible travel are the research stage and the monitoring/follow up sections.  If we want to be responsible, we need to understand the true impacts of the choices we are making.

3.  What does your company do to make sure it travels responsibly?

We are willing to change, transparent about our mistakes and the lessons we are learning, open to suggestions and new ideas, and we work to educate travelers on ways they can improve all aspects of their future travel. Our tours bring travelers to meet with the people and organizations making changes in Cambodia and helps them develop a framework for which to better analyze and understand the issues facing Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and community groups. Our goal is that travelers with PEPY Tours will change the way they give, travel, and live as a result of their trip with us.

4.    Tell us about a successful initiative.  And an unsuccessful one – what did you learn?

We used to bring people to visit a variety of programs in Cambodia, including model orphanages. Our trips were supporting these orphanages through on-going funding, so we felt that the chance to visit the place where their money was going would be a great way to connect travelers to their local impact. This view was too traveler focused, as even if it would increase fundraising potential, the cost of bringing groups of foreigners into a home which is supposed to be a safe-haven for children is not a responsible practice and should be replaced by less voyeuristic fundraising initiatives.  We did not have any direct incidents as a result of bringing travelers to these orphanages, but we felt that we were contributing to a growing trend of orphanage tourism which we believe is, overall, very harmful to both the children and to efforts to reduce corruption in Cambodia.  If donor dollars can be linked to orphanage tourism, then more and more fake orphanages will continue to be created as business, as we see here in Cambodia.

In the first few years of offering tours, we used to indulge the travelers and our own desire to “give back” on our tours through tangible ways.  Most people feel more connected to a project if they can physically “help” – paint something, build something, “see results”.  The problem with this mindset is that most of the actions travelers are contributing involve giving things away to people or building items, not building people.  We have learned that what Cambodia needs most is capacity building among leaders who are looking to improve their own lives and that things like teacher training and skill building will do more to improve education than building schools.  If we continue to only offer travelers ways to give back physically, we will teach them that improvements are equated to developing infrastructure but not a nation of people.

For the last few years we have taken the time to expose our travelers to these ideas and concepts through reading materials, educational activities, and sharing our previously incorrect assumptions and mistakes.  Travelers now leave our trips better able to support sustainable on-going projects designed to leave Cambodia and Cambodians better equipped to improve their own country rather than fostering a continued dependency on outside support.

5.   What’s some advice you can offer to travelers wanting to travel responsibly?

Read up before you travel. Do NOT give money to any organization you do not know and have not researched. To do your research, speak with people working in a similar sector in a nearby area as they will have more honest feedback about a group’s work than their own website will offer.

As one of our NGO partners said, “You have to earn the right to leave your money in this country.”  If we all recognize that we, as individuals, DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO FIX THE PLACES WE VISIT by giving money away, we will have less negative impacts of funding corrupt and ill-planned programs. Sustainable changes take long-term efforts and need to last much longer than a short visit to a new place on vacation.  By finding the people and programs committed to finding ways to make long term change, your money will go much further than giving it to a child-beggar on the street. In fact, perhaps that child would not be begging in the tourist area you are visiting if it was not profitable to do so. By cutting off that funding stream to the “pimp” who possibly rents that child out per day as a beggar and redirecting it to on-going programs supporting the needs of children living on the street, you will likely have a much better impact on the places you visit.

Our focus is really on encouraging travelers to be socially responsible. The media and public relations campaigns from large tourism corporations are full of green travel tips, such as conserving water and energy, recycling, using refillable water bottles, and making sure your hotel is doing everything they can to conserve. These are certainly important things to work on. At that level, though, the entire social aspect of sustainability is just missing.

If you are looking to volunteer abroad, ask a lot of questions about how they choose their partners, monitor their impact, and what mistakes they have made. The most responsible groups will offer you transparent and honest answers to those questions.  Ask about how your specific program was designed.  I have asked English teaching volunteer programs which travelers pay a significant fee for why they have chosen to offer English teaching as their volunteer opportunity when they seem to always be scrapping to find NGO partners as the response has been “That is what travelers are looking to do.”  Do we want our impact to be designed for YOU, or designed to fit actual needs? If we want to fit actual needs, then sometimes we need to be willing to do the less glamorous jobs, have less opportunities to visit orphanages and pet children, and be satisfied that we are indeed doing good rather than “getting a rewarding experience.”  It shouldn’t be about us.  If you want to be comfortable, have fun, and get to play with kids, go to an amusement park.

If you want to know more, visit the PEPY Tours website.

About WorldNomads.com

WorldNomads.com keeps you travelling safely.  Whether you’re off for a long weekend, looking for the ultimate adventure or living the nomadic dream, you’ll stay safe with Travel Insurance you can buy online, anytime, and the latest travel safety advice. We’ll also help you share your journey with a free travel blog, flirt in over 25 languages with our free language guides, have an experience of a lifetime on a travel scholarship and donate to a local community development project through our Footprints program.

I recently tried to post a comment in response to this listing on Trip Advisor which encourages visits to orphanages while traveling in Siem Reap.

As my comment was not  a review of the area, it was not approved, so I am posting it here.

—

I am writing in response to a post stating that one way to give back to Siem Reap is by visiting orphanages.

I beg to strongly disagree.

Having lived in Cambodia for over four years, my opinion on visiting orphanages has gone from encouraging it to abhorring it.  Recent research has shown that the number of orphanages in Cambodia has tripled in recent years with the majority of those “serving” kids who are not orphans at all.  There are some groups standing up this movement to encourage support for whole families rather than removing children from their parents, but in many of the worst cases, the poor practices are not from lack of foresight but instead from fraudulent intentions to start.

Orphanages that keep kids in squalor and can attract tourists on a daily basis are able to bring in far more funding than they choose to use to support their “orphans”.  The practice of keeping kids looking needy to bring in more income is highly linked with donor visits to orphanages and with increasing travelers’ philanthropy in the area.  Sometimes “doing  good” can cause harm, and the practice of visiting orphanages which you have not properly vetted, and which have not properly vetted you, can be a harmful practice.

People have asked me “What is a good orphanage I can go visit today?”  And my answer is always: “Any orphanage where they will LET you visit today, un-planned, is likely NOT a good orphanage.”

Keep these things in mind when visiting Siem Reap, or any developing country.  There is so much to see and so many great projects to support which, can provide more direct benefit than funding the often corrupt orphanage network in Cambodia.  Overall, if you want to see temples, learn about history and culture, are looking for an adventure, and want to meet people who are working hard to improve the future for their next generation, Cambodia is the place to do it.  Just don’t trust all orphanages to be the best choice of your additional support.

My friend and colleague, Soe, passed this poem by Martin Niemoller around our office today, drawing the connection to the Khmer Rouge period.  It is a powerful message which I wanted to share with those of you who don’t know the poem, and all of us who should read it again, and again, and again…

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Speak out when there is something you don’t believe in.  Please.

I try to avoid spending much time on “bar street”, a place in Siem Reap which is full of, yep, bars.  The main reasons I avoid it now are no longer just the noise, the embarrassing displays of lack-of-clothing on gap-year tourists, the drunken fools, nor the begging, though those reasons alone should be enough…. the  biggest reason I can’t stand to be there is now the orphanage tourism exploitation which is fed by this crowd with lubricated pockets, melted hearts, and lack of knowledge about responsible giving or responsible travel.  I came home one night after dinner a few months ago, furious from watching an “orphanage” roadside display: poor-looking children dragged  through the street by an adult carrying a sign saying “visit our orphanage”.  The children play songs, the tourists clap and throw money, and I want to scream some sense into the irresponsible supporters of this behavior.

That night I sent out an email to friends who work in Siem Reap and others who I thought would agree that this issue was an important one, asking for help to come up with a plan for how to curb this behavior.  My initial suggestion was a very abrasive and probably too condescending cartoon aimed at asking tourists to reconsider the effects of their “good” behaviors. A lot of us who work in Cambodia feel the same way about exploitative orphanage tourism, so we have gotten together a few times to try to discuss how we can help educate the traveling population who feed these irresponsible and often fake orphanages.  It’s clear that, for most of these travelers, their hearts are in their right places, and they want to do good by what they see as these “poor helpless looking kids” they think they are helping.  What’s not clear is how to slap them upside the head with a dose of reality that let’s them know they are supporting a movement towards harmful child rights violations, without making then too afraid to trust anyone in the future.  We have a few ideas we are working on.  (Something to note: Go to the police or start a “responsible orphanage practices” training course, are not viable solutions.  Corruption and a clear understanding of the child rights violations being committed by those using children to make money for themselves are two of the reasons why.)

In the meantime, I had been meaning to write about this, but I hadn’t found the time to get these thoughts on “paper”.  Saundra’s  Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog on “Hug-an-orphan vacations” inspired me to write some of this down.  Below is what I wrote on her post.

I would love to hear other people’s experiences in regards to this issue.  Those who have joined our discussions, please add additional thoughts which you think should be shared in the comments section or pass this on.

—-

Thank you for putting this up, Saundra. I think another thing to note is that “orphanages” might not actually have “orphans”! Of all of the orphanages I have come across in Cambodia, there is only one that I know of which exclusively only takes in orphans (as in, children with no parents). Others still use the name orphanage, but act more like a boarding school for underprivileged children or a safe haven for children whose parents have been deemed unfit to raise them. The worst ones, and this is unfortunately more common than people would like to think, RENT kids from their parents. Yes, indeed, it is sick but true.

I have often commented that I would not want to be reincarnated as a cute Cambodian kid. If I was reincarnated as an ugly one, I might have a chance to go to school, but a cute one living near a tourist area might not have the chance to go to school as they would be the most successful beggars. They might be rented by some entrepreneurial person who sees how much money visiting foreigners give to orphanages, so they would be kept looking as poor as possible to attract more funds. The orphanage might outright buy the kids from their family or pay the family a small fee per month to keep their child there as a tourist attraction and fundraising tool.

To so many people, this sounds too inhumane to be true, but often times those are the same people funding these issues. Some of these “orphanages” parade their children around the outdoor bar areas in Siem Reap at night, playing music and handing out fliers asking people to visit their orphanage. It’s 11pm at night, and this “orphanage” is traipsing their children, who they are meant to be looking after, around on a street full of drunk foreigners. Doesn’t this just seem wrong, period? Well us foreigners seem to forget our wits at home when we travel, thinking what would be wrong for our kids might be ok for others, and there are countless travelers clapping for the little performers, handing $20 bills to their “caretakers” and promising to visit their orphanage during the week.

A note to travelers: THINK AGAIN before you give money to “poor” looking orphanages or before you go visit one which allows any old foreigner in off the street to pet their kids. Would you want this for your kid? If you want to know if a place is legit, ask other people in the community and others working in the education or child-protection fields in the area. They will be able to tell you which places are legitimate.

As a note: any orphanage where all of the employees are from the same family, especially ones which have only men working there, is a place you might want to reconsider. At least in the Cambodia context, this usually means there is very little outside oversight and the family can then run the place like a family business. Support the protection of children by NOT supporting these places.

For more information about protecting children, I recommend visiting http://www.childsafe-international.org/

–

Go here for Saundra’s full post on “Hug-an-orphan vacations“.