GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 72

individual families and small communities. Other projects have done little beyond reliev-
ing the consciences of travelers as they struggle with the scale of inequities.
In Cambodia these well-meaning tourists have proved ripe for scams. A website called
Scambodia posts examples of phony orphanages. One advertised for “Volunteers Abroad”
asking each volunteer to pay $1,000 a week for room and board while working in an
orphanage—which turned out to be filled with children from neighboring families. One
of the young foreign volunteers turned them in.
Even real institutions raise questions. Many evenings a local orphanage sends a parade
of children marching under its banner through the Bar Street area of Siem Reap, beating
drums, dancing and inviting the tourists to “visit our orphanage.” Tourists take the bait and
drive over to a newly built mansion on the outskirts of town. There they are ushered to
bleachers in a courtyard where the young children dance and put on puppet shows on a
stage festooned with colorful streamers. They pass around a bucket that the foreigners fill
with dollars. At the program's end the tourists are invited back on special days to visit and
play with the children and “give them the love they are missing.”
When the tourists do, they add to their donations and leave sincere notes saying how
much they appreciated this opportunity to know the love of these children. One woman
wrote, “I now know why Angelina Jolie has so many orphan children.”
I went one day, unannounced, and found thirty-six children running around the man-
sion with no supervision. No one was in school. A foreign tourist named Christian, a man
in his twenties from Toronto, was playing with a few of the older boys in the large salon.
With no one to stop me I went upstairs to check out how the children benefited from these
“donations.” Their bedrooms were a mess: there were no beds or cupboards, only clothes
and bedsheets tossed on dirty floors. The bathrooms were locked; the children said the toi-
lets were broken and that they bathed outside. They showed me the pump in the backyard
where several children were soaping down and splashing themselves off.
They said they had no expectations of being adopted. Sophan, an eighteen-year-old
boy, said he had been living with his aunt when he was offered a place at the orphanage
four years earlier. “We play with foreigners,” he said. “No adoptions.”
To be fair, the establishment never actually says the children can be adopted.
In 2012 the United Nations published a report about orphanages in Cambodia entitled
With the Best Intentions. The study said that foreign tourists were major funders of a system
that hurt children more often than helped them. The children in these orphanages usu-
ally had at least one living parent: 44 percent had both parents; 61 percent had one parent
or close immediate family. Their impoverished families had placed them in the orphan-
ages under the false promise that the orphanage would provide them with an education.
Instead, these pseudo-orphans spend their days raising money.
“Tourists play a major role in funding residential care,” said the report, citing children
staying in their orphanage to play with foreigners or being pulled out of school to dance