Joyce Sanders, Castlemaine
As we organise our trips to Cambodia and book our tours, I hope we can all take an hour’s break on iView to see Steve Morrish’s ABC program “Head First: The Orphan Business” that screened Monday night. There were interviews with us Australian tourists who are keeping the orphan business alive with our visits, and with the young well-meaning school leavers on their two-week orphanage ‘voluntourism’ visits.
Hopefully the new Modern Slavery Act that held a forum in Castlemaine last week will fund a list of the 20 per cent of orphanages that are real, so that we don’t accidentally find ourselves funding the 80 per cent that the UN has found not to be real. In the meantime, we need to be careful where we are sending money, and if in doubt send it to UNICEF who are trying to return children to their native villages and extended families.