Cambodia’s Orphan Business
Posted on June 27, 2012 at 1:31 pm
This was sent to me from Al Jazeera, as it’s a topic I write about frequently.
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Reporter Juliana Ruhfus and director Matt Haan travel to Phnom Penh to investigate Cambodia’s orphan business, and end up as undercover volunteers in a failing orphanage. The resulting grounding breaking documentary reveals how ‘voluntourism’ - the fastest-growing sector of one of the fastest-growing care industries in the world - is fuelling a high-profit volunteering business that sees volunteers’ dreams exploited and Cambodian children separated from their families.
—watch the video here
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Read 20 other posts on orphanages on this blog.
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Dear Saundra, thanks for sharing this video, really instructive.
Just a note on the role that personal awareness (or lack of) can play in social and political change. There is no doubt that volunteers want to ‘give’, but they also want to benefit from such ‘experiences’ (we tend to be selfish altruists!). By educating themselves through websites like yours, young volunteers can make sure that volunteering abroad is truly a beneficial experience for both parties.
It’s not unusual for some volunteers whose expectations have been shattered by the sad reality of the “voluntourism business” to feel angry, betrayed, jaded and burnt-out. Not a good premise to ‘change the world’, but maybe a good starting point to begin asking some important questions.
Thanks to you for continuing to ask thought-provoking questions and not settle for feel-good answers.
[...] reposting this link, which is a repost itself. It talks about Cambodian orphanages and all of the problems with them. [...]
Please can you send me some more information, just had a disappointing experience in Thailand