What Can I do?
Just Peoples co-founder Christey West describes the journey she went on to figure out what she actually could do about the big problems she cared about.
More tourist than changemaker.
The years leading up to launching Just Peoples were filled with adventures and exhilaration. But there was also a good dose of overwhelm at the scale of problems in the world, disgust at what humans can do to each other, and powerlessness.
In my early twenties I had a deep desire to help orphans. I felt so sorry for kids who didn’t have parents to care for them and were living in institutions waiting for someone with a big heart to come along and give them the warm hug that would change their life. I’m only just seeing the similarities with Sleeping Beauty now, but yes, I wanted to be their saviour. And so I moved to Vietnam to volunteer in an orphanage and bring light into orphans’ lives. This was what I could do.
I stayed in a share-house with 20 or so other international volunteers who were all outraged about extreme poverty and wanted to help. We each paid 200 EUR a month for a bunk bed in that feral house. The shower had so much slime there were families of snails living on the walls. At night I could hear the termites eating the wood of my bunk next to my ear. One night I woke up with something on my tummy, over my sleeping bag. It was a rat. We lived in squalor, but that was part of the sacrifice we were willing to make, to save the children who needed our charitable hugs.
Saving innocent lives, one hug at a time.
I started work at the orphanage with two Dutch friends who had already been there for two months. They showed me how to take the kids for tooth brushing, hand washing and dancing around the room. They explained how to smile and nod when I didn’t understand what the kids were saying because I couldn’t speak Vietnamese. They showed me how the kids greet local and foreign tourists who visit the orphanage each day, to take a look at ‘The Orphans’ and give them candy. They’re so deprived in life they deserve a piece of candy, said every single visitor. In fact the kids pretty much lived on candy, plus a little rice for breakfast and dinner. The visitors would hug the children, give them candy, and take a photo of them. They’d then go home knowing they’d made a difference.
The monk that oversaw the orphanage would show his face to greet journalists and camera crews who wanted to document The Orphans. He would come out and hug the babies then pass them back to volunteers when the cameras left. We were grateful for his enlightened leadership.
I couldn’t wait til the kids loved me.
The kids loved the two Dutch women and were so excited to see them each morning. The volunteers had their favourites who they’d play with all day, smiling and loving them. I couldn’t wait until the kids attached themselves to me like that too. It didn’t matter that I was leaving in two months. That would be long enough for them to get the love they needed in order to grow into well-adjusted adults with stable, safe lives.
One day I hugged a one-year-old boy who was upset that his favourite person had disappeared (she’d gone back to her country). He bit me hard on my nose, drawing blood. I was shocked and in pain and passed him along to someone else to deal with. He was a difficult one.
When the two Dutch women went back to Holland after their three months helping The Orphans, it was up to me and a new volunteer to run the room. The system the Dutch had set up, which was different to the system from three months earlier, fell apart by day two. The favourite kids were now despondent, vacant and disengaged.
Thankfully some tourists stopped by and gave the kids the sugar hit they needed to forget that the women who’d loved them for three months had disappeared.
Then it finally struck me: I had no idea how to look after these kids, teach them or love them. I didn’t know what they needed or how to help them. I couldn’t even speak to them. And I certainly couldn’t save them. In fact, my very presence was harming them.
Contemplating what on earth I was thinking.
As I contemplated what on earth I was thinking when I moved to Vietnam to disrupt these vulnerable children’s lives, my eyes settled on a girl who was about seven years old. She was eating a dead, raw sparrow. It was disgusting.
Around that time I discovered it was an orphanage for kids who were HIV positive. This may’ve been useful to know earlier (given the bite on the nose), but in the grand scheme of things it was just another layer of bleakness in these poor kids’ lives.
My disillusionment led me to question the system that flies in a conveyor belt of foreign bleeding hearts to do their part for humanity and then leave the vulnerable objects of their contribution worse off. Worse off!
But the volunteers weren’t the problem; they were mostly well-intentioned young people who wanted to make a difference and took action to do so. It’s not their fault that institutions that accept them without background checks or questions asked, were run by people who profited from their desire to save the world.
And that’s not even the sickest part.
I wondered where all the donations were actually being spent, because the kids’ accommodation was even worse than the volunteers’. It turned out that the smiling monk in the media, and the director of the organisation that brought in volunteers and housed them in filth, were taking large donations from visitors, volunteers, and even foreign embassies, and using them to buy designer bags, luxury holidays in Europe, and BMWs!
They were intentionally keeping kids poor so visitors had a compelling reason to keep donating.
My outrage was so hot it burned my cheeks and my heart. I can feel it again now in the back of my neck as I type. Other volunteers who discovered the truth were furious and distressed too. And then they returned to their countries. The outrage slowly wore off and life went on.
Like them, I moved on once my two months were up. I’d lifted the lid on a system of corruption and exploitation, but what could I do about it? I had signed up for hugging children, not taking down the system that keeps them impoverished. Where would I even begin? I was completely out of my depth again. And besides, it was time for my next volunteer experience, so…
It made complete sense for me to fix the house on the river.
The next project brought its own sequence of events that left me in disbelief, burning rage, grief for the people being exploited and for the waste of resources being poured into projects that don’t create meaningful change, but often create harm.
It had all seemed so straightforward: Go to Vietnam, give compassionate love to orphans, feel good knowing your life has purpose and thanks to you, poor people are not poor. I felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of suffering and utterly powerless to do anything about it. Now it was my turn to be despondent.
I taught Human Rights at a university in Hanoi years before I’d ever studied it. Poor students.
Anh and ten of her friends spent weeks making hundreds of eco sponges that never sold. The women received nothing for their work.
But it wasn’t all utterly futile.
The orphanage and the many horrifying experiences that followed all delivered their own hard but essential lessons. I can now connect the dots and see that each failed project was a stepping stone towards figuring out how I can actually be of use. I realised that I didn’t need to be there in person, hugging kids, in order to help. And it wasn’t up to me to dismantle corrupt systems that exist in some institutions in Vietnam (as much as I would’ve liked to).
Skilled, experienced and knowledgeable local people who stay for as long as it takes to establish real opportunities for people to break the cycle of poverty, are the ones that need to be there. And thankfully they are there, at every level of society, changing it from the inside.
Supporting these local leaders by sourcing funds for them to do more of the incredible, life-changing work that they do, is what I can do.
I learned the hard way that providing short-term affection isn’t enough to lift people out of poverty.
Jo and I “helping out” local farmers before we figured out how to actually help.
If you’d like to hear more about the back stories that eventually led to the creation of Just Peoples, co-founder and CEO Johanna de Burca describes her personal journey in this podcast.
And we’d love to hear your comments below!