Charity by Consumption

We get up early and walk into town for a yoga class at the hostel which on Friday, we had characterised as some kind of paradise. It turns out, however, to be just a hostel. A good one. If you're thinking of hostelling in Siem Reap, it's probably one of the best ones. But still. It's a hostel. Everything's in English, there's a barbeque every night, there's pop music by the pool and a seemingly unflushable poo in the loo. Poo excepted, it's got everything you need to make a home from home. And the yoga room is peaceful, looking out over a temple. The yoga is good, though more focused on exercise and sweat than our previous Sivananda yoga classes were. Oddly, despite generally assuming myself to be more interested in yoga as exercise than as anything more holistic, I find I miss the relaxation, the breathing exercises and the precise instruction. You don't know what you want, I reflect, until you swap it for something else. I guess that's why so many people want to travel. You don't know how to view your life and what motivates you to live it until you get out of it.

We walk, still a rather unfetching sweaty puce colour, to the New Leaf Book cafe where we are hoping to find a way to volunteer. The poverty in Cambodia is not the only thing that characterises it. There is much beauty and strength in it too. But it is striking. And when you're striding about in it in new elephant trousers, fussing about pennies but having access to further thousands of them, you want to even the balance a little and do something to help.

The trouble is, helping is fraught with difficulty. 'Children are not tourist attractions' says one poster, calling out against what is becoming a serious problem in Cambodia, namely 'voluntourism'. What is sad is that what this boils down to is that lots of people have a genuine heart for the poverty they see and want to help. Few of them can afford to give a lot of money - they are probably on a fairly tight budget, and they have worked out, quire rightly, that giving the odd dollar here and there to a beggar is not going to solve much in the long term. 

Perhaps it is possible to make a big difference one individual at a time. Possibly adopting one person, endowing them with money, help, food and training might genuinely make a difference to that person's life. It's a valid approach. It's much easier to feel strongly about one other human, that it is about a whole race or class of them. And making a difference does not require single handedly changing the world. A major change to help one person is, arguably, still a difference.

But in many ways this remains impractical. There is the need for resources, for ample money to give as well as the right contacts in terms of training, healthcare it rehabilitation. There is the problem of choosing which lucky person will get the benefit of your help, and choosing wisely. There's the question of how long you commit to this cause. If you 'adopt' a drug addict, pay for rehabilitation and find them a job - and they relapse, do you give up? Or should you be moving on, starting the process again with someone else? Whose responsibility is that person n the first place? Their own? Or yours because they are unable to help themselves? And in the case of a relapse? At what point does that responsibility transfer back to them? When they are deemed healthy? When they can look after themselves? Who determines that point? And what if they travel full circle?

The answer, as most advisors will tell you, is not to give money to individual causes but to trusted organisations that you have researched thoroughly and which are trying to tackle the root problem for multiple individuals and society in general.

But there is a human desire for contact. It's very difficult to motivate us to help from a distance. I have a friend who used to drive a truck full of humanitarian aid to Romanian orphanages.

"What would be really helpful and would go the furthest is money" he said, "but everyone wants to give teddy bears."

The prosaic things don't inspire us in the same way. I have another friend who had people knitting scarves for people struck by poverty in colder climates. There was an enormous enthusiasm for this. Soon she was over run by scarves. When one person handed her, not a scarf, but an envelope full of money to pay for the postage she was moved. She had been wondering how on earth she would pay for the transition of the scarves. But no one wants to be the person who paid for a stamp. They want to be the knitter of a personal scarf. Interestingly, this friend had also asked people to knit their scarves in thick wool and to make them plain, practical and hardy. Nearly everyone wanted their scarf also to be pretty. People took pride in their scarves. They became personal works of art, knitted with great care and love. But what is the right balance between great intentions and practicality?

In Cambodia there is huge demand for volunteer work. The Asian culture is always enterprising and so a number of opportunities for this have sprung up. A good number are also good intentioned, but if people volunteer for less than six months teaching English, for example, or without the right skills, are the children receiving as good an education as they might with a consistent teacher, if non native? Going to an orphanage to play with and care for the children for a few weeks is nice for everybody in the short term, but how good is that in the longer term for their already shaky stability? 

In my research to find out what we can do, I found, to my horror, articles warning me of a practice of farming in children from stable homes to create an orphanage for the tourists, of children from happy but poor backgrounds being given voluntarily to an orphanage by parents in the hope they will have better opportunities. In fact they would have been better at home with two parents and a better schooling system. 

I should note here that I am absolutely not discrediting all Cambodian orphanages. The last thing I want to do is discourage support of these. The vast majority are run by caring, ethical people and organisations and both need and deserve your help. What I am not convinced by is whether they would benefit from my physical presence as opposed to my money, unless I can suddenly acquire a useful skill such as teaching, nursing or agriculture. I would have been first on the list for a visit to an orphanage, but I have done some research which is making me wonder. Not just about the wisdom of short term visits to Cambodian orphanages, but about where my own motivation is coming from.

Because, even after shelving the orphanage idea, I spent several hours scouring the internet for other volunteering opportunities. I could help on a farm. It costs a fee I can't quite afford, but I could do it. The problem is, the orphanage articles have set me thinking. Wouldn't community farming be better done as a long term job for a reasonable wage for a Cambodian farmer out of work? How much time would be taken out by a full time worker to train me and to ensure I was doing things right? How much physical work in this heat could I handle? Perhaps they would benefit more from a donation to employ a full time worker than they would from a week of my unskilled labour. 

In the end I find myself asking who exactly the 'volunteering opportunity' is for. I can't answer for every case, especially where the volunteering is much longer term and the activity suited to the volunteer's skills. But in my case I have no immediate useful skills and am not around long enough to gain them. I am an unskilled temp. I think the images in my mind when I think about volunteering revolve around a need to see immediate effect, a yearning for gratitude, and an, albeit natural, longing for a personal touch. 

I am not sure who it is that's getting the opportunity.

In my case, (I can't and won't speak for everyone else) perhaps it might be more effective for the people I want to help if I give my money, rather than myself.

Which brings us back to the  uncomfortable realisation that we are not all millionaires. Some of us don't have the money to put anything substantial into the hands of those ethical, well chosen organisations previously eulogised about. We can't make a monetary donation equal to five days work.

And there's something else as well. The fact is it's not that awful that we want a personal experience. It's OK to want to see the effects of your donation, or to form a more real attachment to an organisation than the credit card form on its website.

And this, it seems, is where Cambodia can help you. There's a man who plays Bach on the cello and talks about his experiences helping street children. A performance is free with an 'encouraged' donation. Another charity invites you to 'visit' its headquarters to learn more about its work. The visit is free. The 'Peace Cafe' has a fair trade shop. There is a play every evening written and performed by disabled people, about the struggles of life with a disability, free with a donation. You can give donations of blood as well as money to the Angkor Children's Hospital. If you hire a bike, you can get it from White Bikes and the proceeds will go to educational and clean water projects. When you pay for your temple pass the money is going towards temple upkeep but also beautification projects for the town which will encourage tourism and hopefully pull the whole country up and into greater prosperity in time. Later, and after I have experienced a child selling bracelets at a temple, I will pick up a leaflet on child safety in Cambodia, which provides numbers to call if you think a child is at risk, and provides alternative places to put your money if you encounter children forced to beg or sell trinkets.

Even choosing to shop on the market gives money straight into the hands of local people.

I have still not entirely given up on volunteering, but I think I am willing to accept that my money is, in this case, worth more than my self. I would like to visit charities, and to hear and spread word about what they are doing. I don't have extra money to hurl at a project, but I have money set aside for this trip which I can spend on the right things. It is perhaps more dignified for everybody, if I can consume conscientiously, and give what I can. 

It is sad how complicated it can be to be kind. But it's worth thinking carefully about why exactly you want to help, and who your envisaged 'help' is for. I don't know if I have it right yet. It still feels painfully small a contribution. Perhaps there is another way.

The hardest thing is to be prosaic. To be the invisible contributor of boring necessities. We long for a connection that is perhaps not ours to have. Poverty, from a tourists perspective, can seem quaint. But it isn't put on for our entertainment. It's not a role playing game. It's somebody's actual life. It's smelly and gritty and hard to stomach. Like the meat and fish section of Phsar Leu market. Maybe the best thing you can do is buy people out of it.