Poor parents routinely duped into sending children to homes
where owners use them to extract money from foreign visitors
By Pete Pattisson
 |
A child is driven away after being rescued by police from
the Happy Home
orphanage in
|
What the 26-year-old Spaniard did not
know was that her good intentions were unwittingly feeding an industry that
dupes poor parents into sending their children to bogus orphanages in order to
extract money from well-meaning foreigners.
It is a business model built on a
double deception: the exploitation of poor families in rural Nepal
Volunteering, or
voluntourism as it is sometimes known, is a rapidly expanding
industry. There are dozens of agencies offering the chance to spend weeks, or
months, working at some of the country's 800 orphanages.
More than 80% of these institutions are
located in the most popular tourist hotspots: the ancient Kathmandu Valley
Yet many of the occupants of these
sites have at least one living parent. The latest investigation by Unicef, the
UN's children agency, found that 85% of children in the orphanages they visited
had at least one living parent.
The trade in children begins in Nepal
Lojung Sherpa sent three of her
children to the Happy Home orphanage in the capital after she was told that
foreigners would educate them and raise money for one of her daughters, who has
a serious medical condition. But when Sherpa spoke to her daughter some time
later, she was told that all donations towards her treatment had been taken by
the orphanage's owner.
Sherpa travelled to Kathmandu to remove her children from the home
but was repeatedly turned away. After an investigation, which resulted in the arrest
of the orphanage owner on charges of child abduction and fraud, police officers
discovered that Sherpa's children were missing. The youngsters were later found
at various locations across the city, where they had been hidden, and
eventually reunited with their mother.
Philip Holmes,
chief executive of Freedom Matters, the charity that instigated the
inquiry into Happy Home, said that in the worst cases this practice constituted
child trafficking.
"Once a child enters an orphanage,
he or she seems to become the property of the orphanage owner ... [In effect],
they become prisoners of the orphanage," he said. "[They] use the
children as an income source, through the sponsorship of children who are presented
as being orphans when they are not … and through the exploitation of overseas
volunteers."
When Dorota Nvotova, a young Slovakian,
began volunteering at Happy Home in 2008, she was so moved by the children's
plight that she found a sponsor for every one of them. She raised about
€150,000 (£122,000) for the home, but it was only later that she discovered the
real reason its owner was so eager to attract foreign volunteers.
"It's definitely about him making
money. For him, it's a business," she said. "Whenever volunteers came
he always tried to impress them and then they started fundraising for
him."
Argeisa admits that she too felt
compelled to help the children of Nepal
She quickly signed up and paid $480
(£285) to spend four weeks looking after the children, but had no idea their
profiles had been fabricated. "I couldn't imagine there were people doing
bad things to children and using the vulnerability of children to make
money," she said.
After strange behaviour at the
orphanage aroused her suspicions about the home's proprietor, Argeisa
discovered that two sisters publicised as being orphans had living parents who
had paid vast sums of money to a broker to send their children to the home to
be educated.
And they were being educated, but at a
cost far beyond anything her parents could imagine. The girls were being used
to generate donations from tourists, with the orphanage claiming that their
mother and father had abandoned them and no other relatives could be found.
"These little girls are very
important for the owner of the home to get money. This is the only reason that
they want these children," Argeisa said. "They are [being]
used."
After one of the sisters confessed that
she was being sexually abused by the owner, Argeisa reported the allegations to
a local children's organisation, Action for Child Rights (ACR ). The owner of the orphanage was
subsequently arrested for attempted rape.
"This was very, very hard … I
couldn't stop my feelings against that man," Argeisa said. "I think
his mission was making money … and abusing children ... He wouldn't have set up
the home if there were no westerners coming and giving money and doing
volunteering.
"The foreigners do not realise
what is happening because they [orphanage owners] are specialists in stopping
people from seeing the dark side. There are many people living for six months
in an orphanage and they don't realise this, because these children are scared
… These houses are jails for these children."
This is not an exceptional case, says
Jürgen Conings, general director of ACR , who has spent 10 years in Nepal
A report by Tourism Research and Marketing
estimates that volunteer tourism attracts 1.6 million people a year, and that
the market is worth up to £1.3bn.
While there are
no reliable figures about the scale of voluntourism in Nepal
The government recognises the problem
but is struggling cope with the scale of it. "These children are a
showpiece [for fundraising], but no one knows how much the owner gets and how
much goes to the children," said Tarak Dhital, executive director of the
Central Child Welfare Board (CCWB). "We have introduced minimum standards
for children's homes and we need to strengthen our monitoring systems, but
haven't been able to till now … we lack financial and human resources."
The CCWB is responsible for regulating
orphanages in Nepal
However, Conings cautioned against the
blanket condemnation of Nepalese orphanages. "A lot of good things are
done; a lot of NGOs and social workers are doing an amazing job," he said.
"We would never say it's not good [to volunteer], but we want to bring
this to the public's attention. There is a positive and negative, so be aware
and make good decisions."
But Nvotova questions the premise of
volunteering at an orphanage. "[Foreigners] feel cool by doing this,"
she said. "But I think it's more selfish than useful. Very often
[volunteers] don't want to see the truth. They just want to feel needed and
useful."
