Hope for Cambodia

The Quest: to respond when Cambodia plucks at your heart strings - but avoid being played

Not an answer I have yet. But something which, if I learn nothing else about Cambodia before I leave, I really want to crack.

Cambodia is struck by poverty. In Siem Reap at least 45% of the population is considered 'very poor'. Children beg, sell trinkets, work in rice fields or in fishing vessels, their parents barely able to feed them, let alone send them to school. The cost of living is much higher than the average wage and charities exist which provide pairs of one dollar flip flops for families unable to afford even this most basic footwear. 

However, where poverty is rife, pity is also rife and pity is food for scams. Cambodia is considered by some to be the scam capital of the world, vying for this title with Nigeria, which is the online scam capital of the world. 

This situation makes the poor poorer, the weak more exploited and steals from Cambodia not just money, but some of its hope.

Some children are made to beg because they are more likely to move a western heart to generosity. The proceeds are often quickly taken by whoever is in charge. This may be genuinely poor parents, but may also be organised gangs. The children will not be fed well even if there is enough money because they need to look down at heel enough to produce the same takings another day. I don't know what happens when they get too old to pull heartstrings any more.

Many organisations and individuals offer orphanage tours or floating village tours, exploiting the children or inhabitants and quite often ending with a request that the tourist buy study materials, food or clothing from a store at the end of the trip for the sake of the children or families that have been 'viewed'. On doing so, tourists are told the food will be better than materials, then that the food in the store is not nutritious and that money for rice would be better. The price of the rice is hugely inflated. Where people do buy or pay there is no way of knowing whether the funds or goods make it to the people they are apparently intended for. It is generally believed that they don't.

This is not intended as a Daily Mail style diatribe painting all Cambodians as scheming scavengers, out to con. That is absolutely not true. What I want to do is set the record straight and find a route through this quagmire of well intentioned pitfalls to identify what we can actually do to help Cambodia, as opposed to what we shouldn't.

And the reason this is particularly important to me is that I have a score to settle. I gave fifty dollars to fund the exploitation of women and babies on my first day here and I owe at least fifty dollars to help those families who are poor or desperate enough to have fallen into it.

Let me explain. When I was approached by a women holding a baby and asking for milk powder I melted and bought fifty dollars worth of it. Recently I found out the truth. The woman was in the employ of a large, Mafia style group who send women out with babies, and who have an agreement with certain shops. The milk powder is immediately returned, the proceeds split and the takings given back to the controllers of the group. If the women look genuinely desperate, it's because they are. If the babies look sleepy it's because they may have been drugged and they are almost certainly not the children of the woman holding them. In the worst case they may have been sold or stolen. Expats trying to warn tourists have been threatened with violence and the government either doesn't know or the group are too powerful to be argued with.

And I bought into that.

So I owe it to Cambodia to find a way to help that isn't going to worsen the situation for all concerned. And even without that misspent fifty dollars, I cannot keep walking past destitute people, knowing better than to directly give them anything, but doing nothing else either.

This is me launching a quest to help Cambodia intelligently. I have found a charity called The Trailblazer Foundation in Cambodia: http://www.thetrailblazerfoundation.org/the-foundation/why-we-exist/

I plan to embark on a fact finding mission. This charity allows you to visit their headquarters to learn more. I have emailed them to arrange a visit. The charity is endorsed by the Peace Cafe (which speaks out against such practices as orphanage tours so is discerning). I get no results if I google it with the word 'scam'. The website seems genuine. But I will still keep researching between now and our visit, if we can have one. There has to be organisations in Cambodia, employing local Cambodian people and working alongside the poorest villages to help them help themselves and become sustainable. Trailblazer appears to be these things. 

But watch this space. In the meantime if anyone has any information about other charities working in Cambodia, about Trailblazer or any other information that could help me while I'm here please post it in the comments or email it to me.

The only thing I ask is please don't post comments telling me about other scams in Cambodia. There are other sites for that and it's worth posting there to warn people. But this is about hope for Cambodia. A route to get past all that. You can't plot your journey if you don't know where you are going.