I just would like to thank everyone who ever reblogs this so that it somehow ends up back on my dash because I usually need the reminder (especially the drinking water one)
Like an increasing number of tourists visiting Nepalās mountain peaks, colourful markets and lush national parks, Marina Argeisa wanted to experience the latest must-do activity on the tourist trail: a volunteering stint at an orphanage.
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 and the manipulation of wealthy foreigners. In the worst cases, tourists may be unwittingly complicit in child trafficking.ā¦
Yet many of the occupants of these sites have at least one living parent. The latest investigation by Unicef, the UNās children agency, found that 85% of children in the orphanages they visited had at least one living parent.
The trade in children begins in Nepalās remote and impoverished countryside, where parents are tricked into sending their children to orphanages, often lured by the promise of an education.ā¦
āOnce a child enters an orphanage, he or she seems to become the property of the orphanage owner ā¦ [In effect], they become prisoners of the orphanage,ā he said. ā[They] use the children as an income source, through the sponsorship of children who are presented as being orphans when they are not ā¦ and through the exploitation of overseas volunteers.ā
When Dorota Nvotova, a young Slovakian, began volunteering at Happy Home in 2008, she was so moved by the childrenās plight that she found a sponsor for every one of them. She raised about ā¬150,000 (Ā£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.
āItās definitely about him making money. For him, itās a business,ā she said. āWhenever volunteers came he always tried to impress them and then they started fundraising for him.āā¦
After strange behaviour at the orphanage aroused her suspicions about the homeās 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.ā¦
After one of the sisters confessed that she was being sexually abused by the owner, Argeisa reported the allegations to a local childrenās organisation, Action for Child Rights (ACR). The owner of the orphanage was subsequently arrested for attempted rape.
āThis was very, very hard ā¦ I couldnāt stop my feelings against that man,ā Argeisa said. āI think his mission was making money ā¦ and abusing children ā¦ He wouldnāt have set up the home if there were no westerners coming and giving money and doing volunteering.ā¦
This is not an exceptional case, says JĆ¼rgen Conings, general director of ACR, who has spent 10 years in Nepal investigating the nexus between foreigners, adoption agencies and orphanages. "Iām 100% sure that the majority of these homes are built for reasons other than childcare,ā he said. āForeign volunteers give a home credibility ā¦ and they pay to volunteer, so itās a strong business model.ā
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 Ā£1.3bn.
While there are no reliable figures about the scale of voluntourism in Nepal, Martin Punaks, country director of Next Generation Nepal, which reunites orphanage-trafficked children with their families, believes it is a growing industry. āThere is the potential for huge profits to be made for those who intentionally and unnecessarily displace children from their families, so they can be used as lucrative poverty commodities to raise funds from well-intentioned but ill-informed tourists,ā he said.
āThe latest investigation by Unicef, the UNās children agency, found that 85% of children in the orphanages they visited had at least one living parentā
And yet UNICEF insists on continuing to define any (non-white/non-Western/indigenous) child whoās lost just ONE parent as an āorphan.ā
think of every black person in the world and for you to say āIām not attracted to black peopleā means that youāve seen every single one of those people and determined youre not attracted to every individual. since this is impossible, saying youāre not attracted to black people means that thereās something each of those people have in common that you find unattractive: blackness. and if that doesnāt sound racist to youā¦
Basically that horrible case of #HelpLeeJungHee isnāt getting a lot of traction in Korea because thereās powerful people involved which sounds like a conspiracy theory but itās true
Like, you all donāt know how terrible cults are, I honestly think that theyāre a scourge...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogq3pjS_aCcĀ (Follow Up Video)
#HelpLeeJungHee
Iām not sure if these have been posted before but there are videos uploaded by Lee Jung Hee and her sons speaking out about their story on this youtube channel, please spread/download this before it gets taken down.
http://helpleejunghee.weebly.com/Ā (more links and info here)
andulkaphoto
izzy806
jbbartram-illu
gummygunk
romaincrisis
