Delacey Lynda - How (Not) to Start an Orphanage: ... by a Woman Who Did

TARA WINKLER is the Managing Director of the Cambodian Childrens Trust (CCT), which she established with Jedtha Pon in 2007 in order to rescue fourteen children from a corrupt and abusive orphanage.

Tara has led CCT through a number of significant organisational changes, including the closure of the initial CCT orphanage in favour of a holistic model of programs and services to help Cambodian families escape poverty, while ensuring family preservation. Tara now speaks out against the spread of orphanages in developing countries, caused by the good intentions of foreign donors, and of harm that comes to children when they are separated from family and left to grow up in institutions.

In 2011 Tara was awarded NSW Young Australian of the Year in recognition of her work with CCT and she has been featured twice on Australian Story.

How (Not) to Start an Orphanage is her first book.

Dedicated to Sinet and Sineit Chan

First published in 2016

Copyright Tara Winkler and Lynda Delacey 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Australia

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ISBN 9781742376288
eISBN 9781742695174

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Front cover images: Pete Longworth
Cover design: Lisa White

Contents

If youre reading this book, Im guessing its for one of three reasons:

1. You heard about the twenty-one-year-old Aussie girl from Bondi who rescued fourteen kids from a corrupt orphanage in Cambodia. Youre inspired by the idea of helping people in a developing country and you want to know what its like (or at least, what its been like for me).

2. Youre cynical about charities and youre reading this to, you know, feed the fire. (Because dont we all do that sometimes?)

3. Youre already a supporter of the Cambodian Childrens Trust (CCT), the non-government organisation that this book is about, and youve bought a copy because the proceeds help to support our work.

If your reason is number three... thank you! Its because of people like you that CCT exists at all. Even though Im often the one out front receiving the praise, CCTs work is very much a team effort. This team includes our incredibly generous supporters, as well as CCTs amazingly dedicated staff in Cambodia and volunteers in Australia. So this book is a story about a journey that you are also a part of.

If yours is the second reason, I get it! Youll probably find a few reasons to be rather pissed off with me in parts of this story. But hopefully youll come to see that at CCT we are really good at learning from our mistakes, listening to constructive criticism and taking positive action to do better. Theres no gold standard or silver bullet in the fight against poverty, but I do believe CCT, working hand-in-hand with some other exemplary organisations, is helping lead the way in Cambodia.

If your reason is the first (you want to know more about my story), Im going to walk you through my experiencesthe good, the bad and the ugly. Sharing my story in such a public way is not something that comes naturally to me. Id give almost anything to remain behind the scenes and out of the spotlight. But I do understand that when people decide to support a small grassroots operation, they need to get to know and trust those who are running it. So its essential at this stage that I play a much more public role than Im entirely comfortable with.

But of course, for inspiration I need only look at the resilience and courage of the kids and families I work with in Cambodia; if they can soldier on through so much adversity with big, bright smiles still intact, then I can find the courage to share my story with the world.

As the American researcher Bren Brown famously said: The original definition of courage, when it first came into the English languageits from the Latin word cor, meaning heart... was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. That is what I will endeavour to do in this book: to tell you my story, from the heart, honestly and authentically.

I do need to state that Ive changed the names of many of the people and organisations that appear in this story to protect both the innocent and the guilty alike.

And I should warn you, this is not a book about a saintly individual who runs an orphanage. In fact, CCT is not an orphanage anymore.

As I write this, CCT, though only eight-years-young, is a well-respected Cambodian non-government organisation (NGO), whose work is made possible by a small but loyal base of generous supporters. Were all about empowering the next generation of Cambodian kids to reach their full potentialbecause at the end of the day, solving Cambodias problems is not a job for one small NGO. Its not even a job for all of the NGOs in Cambodia (and theres no shortage of them). Its a job for an entire generation. We believe CCTs job is to empower that generation.

We are dedicated to helping Cambodian children to escape the intergenerational cycle of povertyfor good. And, though this may come as a surprise to some, orphanages are not the answer. They are, in fact, a big part of the problem... (I could go on and on about this, and I will! But later...)

For the last few years, weve been achieving our goal by focusing on family. We ensure that some of the most vulnerable children in the world have access to top-notch healthcare and a well-rounded education, while enabling them to stay with their families where they belong. This approach helps to prevent them from being trafficked and subjected to child labour, and from being separated from their families and ending up in orphanages. We do this because its better for the kids, better for the adults theyll grow up to be, and better for the communities they are a part of.

Sometimes, I have to pinch myself when I look back and reflect on how far CCT has come. It seems just yesterday I was standing at the gate of a very different organisation, with fourteen desperate kids running towards me.

And I have to remind myself of how far Ive come too, from the nineteen-year-old backpacker landing in town with a pair of oversized Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses on my head, thinking South-East Asia would be a cool place to hang out for a few months until I went back to real life to continue building my career in the film industry. (Spoiler alert: that never happened.)

So. Here we go.

1

I grew up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney in a not-so-average family. Peter, my dad, is a Hungarian-Australian musician, circus performer and bad-joke-teller. He loves Leonard Cohen and wombats. Sue, my mum, is a professional storyteller, preschool teacher and dog-lover. She loves gardening and listening to ABC radio.

Ive never called them Mum and Dad. Theyve always just been Sue and Peter to me. They never referred to themselves as Mum and Dad, so I didnt either.