The Case of the Vanishing Orphanage
Posted on September 5, 2011 at 5:13 am
This week’s guest post is written by Chris Horst. Chris serves as director of advancement for HOPE International, “a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that alleviates the many dimensions of poverty through the provision of microenterprise development services—microloans, savings services, and biblically based business training—in 16 of the poorest, least-served countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean.” Chris and his wife Alli write the blog Smorgasblurb.
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“You are the first American group to ever visit our community.” Simon’s words sent chills through the missions team that had ventured to his remote Kenyan village. It was a risk to come to such an isolated place, but its undiscovered magnetism was also its allure. Their arrival was a momentous step in a long journey.
Several years earlier, Simon* met these Colorado church leaders at a John Piper conference. They had an immediate kinship. It was hard not to love Simon: He was eminently likeable, oozing charisma with each handshake and smile. Now in Kenya, after months of careful planning, they had finally arrived. As their bus labored up the dusty driveway, the orphanage they knew only by pictures came to life.
The orphanage looked like many like it in Africa: A fenced-in compound with simply-constructed dormitories and classrooms. The zenith of the complex wasn’t its buildings, however. It was the 200 smiling children which greeted the visitors with hoots of delight when their bus arrived. The trip unfolded in typical fashion. The Coloradans spent their days playing with orphans, seizing photo opps, and dreaming with Simon about ways their church could help the orphanage flourish.
Photo via Chris Horst
The trip rattled stereotypes and collided cultures. Simon orchestrated the trip with clockwork precision, his robust leadership skills firing on all cylinders throughout the week. As the trip came to a close, the bus drove the team away. The children chased their bus, wrenching the emotions of even the group’s most stoic members. Hearts full, the team flew home, now well-equipped to share their stories of helping orphaned children and exploring uncharted places.
Despite the many positive moments throughout the week, there were unnerving whisperings among the group. It was strange the teachers didn’t know many of the orphans’ names. It seemed overly-controlling when Simon prohibited them from visiting the neighboring village unaccompanied. Also odd, the orphanage lacked a garden, which is like an Alaskan lacking a snow shovel: The fertile soil can give anyone a green thumb. These quiet whisperings slowly unfolded into loud gasps, and then into protests, and then into many tears, when the group returned to visit Simon’s orphanage just one year later.
On their return trip—one which almost mirrored their previous trip—a team member, Dan, stayed around after the team departed for the States. On his own, Dan journeyed from the Nairobi airport back to the orphanage on a scout mission to investigate the team’s concerns. As he arrived in the village and walked toward the orphanage, a woman approached him, grabbed his arm, and amplified the whisperings.
“Just so you know,” she shared solemnly, “the orphanage is not real.”
Dan, panged with a haunting feeling of betrayal, trekked from the village to the orphanage, hoping to disprove her. He arrived at the place where he played with smiling children just one day earlier. His eyes confirmed the woman’s words: The place was deserted. The yard where the children used to run and play? Nothing remained apart from the lonely debris which bounced with the wind across the red clay earth. The sleeping quarters? Empty. The cafeteria? Vacant. No workers, no orphans, no supplies, no anything. The orphanage had vanished. It was all a mirage.
In truth, the Colorado church was not the first American group to visit Simon’s community. In fact, many churches from across the US and Canada were privy to Simon’s deceitful wooing over the years. His highly-sophisticated web of lies featured faux staff, rented children (he pitched it to their parents as a day camp), and staged arrests (always resulting in generous bail outs by the visitors). All told, this Madoffesque charity scheme collectively defrauded these churches of tens of thousands of dollars. More disappointing, it tainted many wonderful memories and fertilized the unhealthy seeds of cynicism and close-heartedness.
My first response to Simon’s elaborate scam was eye-rolling distrust. This type of story can cultivate skepticism, prompting us to pull back. But it doesn’t have to. It does not mandate that we retreat. It’s been said that to love well we should be “gentle as doves and shrewd as serpents.” The path of helping those in need is not paved with easy solutions nor is it averse to corruption. This is no reason to pull back. The needs and opportunities in our world are too great to not give generously. Yes, we need to be abounding in compassion, but not the undiscerning kind. Go to Kenya, but send back a scout if you sense something is amiss. Pour out generosity, but do so discriminately. Love abundantly, but always ask hard questions. No retreat. No close fists. No bitterness. Go boldly, shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.
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Yet another confirmation that faith-based anything is just another word for naïveté and unaccountability.
What on earth is “biblically-based business training”? Is it anything like “biblically-based science,” which is the exact opposite of science?
I think you have missed the point Alison. As many faith-based projects as secular projects are victim of scammers and poor accountability. Religion like any belief system can be manipulated, the problem is not religion but people who use it for their own selfish needs. This goes against pretty much all religious teachings. I’m an atheist and I have respect for a number of progressive Christians I know that tie together Christianity and science. They are mutually exclusive. This is a great blog that encourages us to remain balanced. Show compassion with pragmatism. The same could be said of our attitude towards religion.
… Or is it more like the “biblically-based child training” which resulted in the death of Lydia Schatz* at the hands of the Godly family that the faith-based agency placed her in? Perhaps it’s like “biblically-based marriage counseling,” where women are enjoined to submit to their husbands and “a soft answer turneth away wrath” means that violence and anger by the husband is always the fault of the wife?
Of course you are going to distance yourself from these teachings and say that they aren’t what you mean, or aren’t really biblical. The point I’m making is that if your ultimate authority is the Bible, then you aren’t doing reality checks. The Bible says I must beat my child, therefore I will do so even if it clearly isn’t helping. The Bible says that meekness is effectiveness against abusers, therefore I will be meek even if the violence is clearly escalating. The Bible says the world was created in seven days, therefore the entire fields of physics and biology are wrong even though the evidence before me in the form of effective technology and medicine shows me clearly that they are very close to correct.
If biblically-based business training does not reference reality as the ultimate standard, it will mislead you. All hypotheses need testing against reality, no matter what their origin. If it does use reality as the ultimate standard it is not biblically-based.
If I were actually interested in helping people (as opposed to demonstrating pious good intentions) I would participate in a secular, reality-based project. If I truly am better than everyone else then people will want to know my secret and I can tell them about my saviour.
* http://blogs.alternet.org/vyckie/2010/02/25/in-micheal-pearls-world-lydia-shatz-is-better-dead-than-spelling-that-word-wrong/
Bobby,
No, I don’t think I’ve missed the point.
It’s certainly possible for a religious person to teach science well. I know some who do. However I would not trust my child’s education to someone claiming to teach “biblically-based biology.” I would prefer them to be taught biology-based biology. (Which is exactly what good biology teachers teach, religious or otherwise.) By the same token, I am suspicious of someone offering “biblically-based business training.” People overseas are just as deserving of education in sound business practices as anyone else. They do not deserve to have someone’s interpretation of the bible’s teaching on accounting fobbed off on them on the grounds that beggars can’t be choosers. They deserve the real thing.
Of course scamming is against religious teaching. Religious organizations are great for motivating and organizing people to perform charitable works. Absolutely. But “faith-based” organizations have a tradition of fighting against regulation and accountability on the grounds that faith and good intentions are enough, which of course they are not. And most church members – like most people generally – don’t understand either evaluation or international development. When a project is created for the purpose of being easy enough for church members to understand and feel good about, and to participate in with minimal education, it is unlikely to be designed for greatest impact on the beneficiaries and likely to be vulnerable to scamming.
I would not expect MSF to be scammed as easily as this church group was. For instance.
I recommend Firelight Foundation’s publication, “From Faith to Action” (found at: http://www.firelightfoundation.org/publication-02.php), which offers a guide to Western-based groups and individuals seeking to contribute resources of time or money to support vulnerable children in Africa.
You know, I don’t feel at all bad for the visiting church group. What do you expect when you don’t do due diligence and swoop in for a *week* of “charity work” aka voluntourism? Exactly why good intentions are not enough.
I’m interested to hear what the church group did once they learned of the scam. Did they talk to Simon about it? Does he still put this kind of thing together? What do practitioners DO when they realize you need more than good intentions? If you don’t know how to respond and create closure, the response will be bitterness and lost trust.
[...] just read a blog post on Good Intentions are Not Enough, a blog that covers international aid work and issues relating to it. The name of the post is [...]
[...] and the lack of adults on site — remind me again of criticism of orphanages as an aid model (here and here) at the blog Good Intentions Aren’t Enough. Hopefully the attention from the movie [...]
I’m A Kenya Christian and I also want to set up a faith based organization orphanage (regardless of what the likes of Alison think.) Considering that don’t have access to funds I feel so bad when i see people who have access to the funds stealing from orphans. For i don’t think they are stealing from the Churches in the US. And to think that the guy had the chance to attend John Piper’s conference (if it’s the Children Desiring God,) it’s just pathetic. But the greatest advice “Go boldly, shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves”
I’m A Kenya Christian and I also want to set up a faith based organization orphanage (regardless of what the likes of Alison think.) Considering that don’t have access to funds I feel so bad when i see people who have access to the funds stealing from orphans. For i don’t think they are stealing from the Churches in the US. And to think that the guy had the chance to attend John Piper’s conference (if it’s the Children Desiring God,) it’s just pathetic. But the greatest advice “Go boldly, shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves”
With all this Koney 2012 stuff this is a breath of fresh air.
[...] borne out his arguments (both in his day and since). He notes that states were already moving away from institutionalized care in the 1950s — as were the mainline Protestant denominations who [...]