This opinion piece from Al Jazeera America, discusses the “knotty mess of the orphanage industry built around Western volunteerism.” The author, Rafia Zakaria, highlights the recent publication of the memoir of Gail Gutradt, entitled “A Rocket Made of Ice,” which describes the author’s trips to the Wat Opot Children’s Community, an orphanage in rural Cambodia. This memoir, posits Zakaria, serves as an example of the popularization and glorification of “orphan-based tourism.” For Zakaria, the story of the Wat Opot orphanage helps to illuminate the “conundrum” around orphanages throughout the globe - that in order to attract volunteers and donors, orphanages will open volunteer opportunities to many un-trained candidates who are drawn by a desire to assuage their own needs for touch and affection.
This ease of access to children - granted to people who do not have experience in child care and who do not undergo background checks - is in complete opposition to accepted international standards on child protection, says Zakaria. And, what’s more, the prevalence of orphanage volunteerism often leads to the unnecessary placement of children into institutions in order to attract more volunteers and funding, despite the fact that many of the children “recruited” to these orphanages do, in fact, have living parents and/or may be placed into institutions before other family-based care options are considered. This practice violates the UN Guidelines on the Alternative Care of Children, which mandates that institutional care be used only as a last, temporary resort for children when all efforts to place them with relatives or foster families have failed.
Zakaria writes that the phenomenon of volunteers from the developed Western world coming into orphanages in developing countries with the desire to become the “savior” who can change the life of a poor, destitute, parent-less child is exactly what perpetuates the systems of inequity and the uneven power dynamics that exist between these disparate groups – systems that lead to the institutionalization of children in the first place. Additionally, says Zakaria, the opportunity for Western donors to be the “savior” becomes more appealing - and instantly, personally gratifying – than does contributing toward more systemic, preventive, and less visibly impactful efforts to help families provide for their children.
In light of this trend, some organizations and networks, such as the Faith to Action Initiative, are trying to raise awareness of the potential harms of orphanage volunteer tourism and to promote more child-centric, rather than donor-centric, solutions such as family reunification and foster care.