Optimistic Voices
Vital voices in the fields of global health, global child welfare reform and family separation, and those intent on conducting ethical missions in low resource communities and developing nations. Join our hosts as they engage in conversations with diverse guests from across the globe, sharing optimistic views, experiences, and suggestions for better and best practices as they discuss these difficult topics.
Optimistic Voices
Volunteers Needed - A new documentary exposing a hidden evil - child trafficking inside of orphan mission
The smiling photos, the painted walls, the “we came to help” posts—so much of orphanage tourism looks uplifting on the surface. But pull on the thread and a harder truth emerges: when volunteers are the customers, children become the product. In this conversation with filmmaker and activist Barak Laub, we uncover how feel-good trips can fuel orphanage trafficking, why unqualified access to vulnerable kids creates real risk, and what ethical, effective alternatives actually look like.
Barak shares how his film, Volunteers Needed, evolved from a carefree travel project into an investigation of a global industry that profits by separating children from families. We break down the mechanics of orphanage trafficking—force, fraud, and coercion; “paper” orphans; curated performances for donors; and weak oversight that keeps institutions funded while delaying family reunification. Along the way, we talk about the cultural and developmental harm of revolving-door visitors, the algorithms that sell volunteer placements to eager travelers, and the difficult cognitive dissonance donors face when good intentions meet bad outcomes.
Most importantly, we map a better path. Learn how to spot red flags (pay-to-volunteer models, unsupervised access, lack of background checks) and seek green flags (qualified roles, strong child protection policies, family-based care goals). We share practical shifts—capacity building over short-term fixes, peer-to-peer professional exchanges, and funding community services that keep children with kin. We also explore the policy lever that could move the system: recognizing orphanage trafficking as a severe form of trafficking in persons to enable enforcement and accountability.
If this topic challenges you, stay with it. Curiosity and courage change systems. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend who’s considered voluntourism, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway or question. Your voice helps push this conversation—and the solutions—forward.
____
Firmly Rooted - A new documentary on orphanage response - the right way!
To view the released trailer and sizzle reel, go to https://firmlyrootedfilm.com/
or to https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org
__________
____
Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.
Contact support@helpingchildrenworldwide.org to discuss how.
___________
Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone. Your small monthly donation, prayers, attention & caring is essential. You advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join
Helpingchildrenworldwide.org
Welcome back to the Optimistic Voices Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Horvath, and I want to say Happy New Year. It's 2026, we're getting off to a little bit of a late start. But here's hoping that 2026 is indeed happy. 2025 had its ups and downs. For those of you out there, I know it did for us, but we are, as always, optimistic. In this episode, I'm going to be talking to a young activist and filmmaker, Barack Law, who is creator of a short documentary film called Volunteers Needed. Today we're talking about something that often hides in plain sight: orphanage tourism, also known as voluntourism, the visits, the mission trips, the service experiences, and the feel-good volunteer moments that are centered around residential care institutions. At first glance, this can look totally harmless, even beautiful. People want to help, they want to love kids, they want to do something. But there's a harder truth underneath all of that. When an orphanage becomes an attraction, children can become a product. And that's where the conversation turns from good intentions to very real risk, because demand creates supply. In some places, that supply has meant recruiting children into institutions to keep the beds full, the donations flowing, and visitors motivated to give. That's why orphanage tourism connects to what many call orphanage trafficking. Not always in the Hollywood sense or the way that you're thinking about trafficking, where someone gets thrown in the trunk of a car and driven across borders, but in the everyday systemic sense, where children are separated from families, paperwork is manipulated, stories are curated, and entire communities are reshaped around what photographs will. So in this episode, we're going to ask what's actually happening when we build trips around vulnerable children in the global south.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to Optimistic Voices, a podcast of helping children worldwide. We help children worldwide by strengthening and empowering families and communities. This podcast is for people interested in deep conversations with thought leaders in the fields of child welfare, global health, and international missions.
SPEAKER_02:Let's get into it. Barak Lobb is the director and producer of Volunteers Needed, a documentary filmed in Nepal that explores the hidden harms of orphanage voluntarism and the systems that can incentivize child separation and exploitation. He first traveled to India and Nepal in 2008, later studied political science and linguistics at Goethe University in Frankfurt, and attended Columbia University before returning to South Asia to make the film with co-director Raymond Steve. When he's not working on Volunteers Needed, Barack consults on digital startups, starts with the MCSO Search and Rescue, and spends his downtime hiking and trail running with his wife and dog. Welcome to Optimistic Voices, Barack. Can you take a few minutes to fill in any gaps I might have left out and give us just a quick idea about what volunteers Volunteers Needed is about?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I I I've always been into travel. At a very young age, let's say probably when I was 11 or 12, I started taking the trains around California to see different places. And when I was 18 or 19, I bought a ticket to Europe, followed by a one-way ticket, and uh lived there for about 10 months, went to Japan, staying in squats, reading philosophy, uh that sort of thing. Just trying to understand the world from different lenses has been a huge drive for me. So the first time I went to India, it was to uh uh read philosophy of the Upanishads, the Bhadvad Gita, the Pali Canon. And I was really interested in just how different the world worked and how cool it was to travel and see new places. So I wanted to go back and make a kind of documentary travel log. I brought my best friend Raymond to had never really traveled outside of the country, and we wanted to make a best friend buddy sort of documentary Anthony Bourdain thing, riding around on motorcycles, uh, meeting new people, going on adventures, staying in monasteries, stuff like that. Um, while we were there, one of the things we discovered was this orphan trafficking. And at first we thought it was just, you know, one bad orphanage that was taking kids away from their families and uh using them as kind of financial commodities. But as we delved deeper, we realized it wasn't just one orphanage, it was the entire industry. And that shifted the whole film of our documentary. We dropped all of the cool drinking beers on fun rooftops and instead shifted to the volunteers who are coming and the donors who are funding these sort of child trafficking rings, uh, often with the best intentions, to the children themselves who are pulled away from their families and often sent on to worse situations.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so just to frame this a little bit for our audience who might be used to traveling to visit orphanages or serve in orphanages on mission trips, and there is a usually an element of fundraising in order to be able to go and do that. There are actually um organizations that for a fee. You pay for the the travel, you pay to serve in the orphanage. It's a um and it's a way for the orphanage to collect the money. It's often called orphan, um, orphanage tourism or volunteerism. Um, and so that's what you're talking about, and volunteers needed, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. So uh volunturism spans lots of different aspects. It can be, you know, animal husbandry or working with the land or um cleaning up schemes, uh, you know, helping to produce better environments for the people who are living there. Uh we focus exclusively on orphan trafficking and volunturism. And something to really keep in mind uh here is we know now that globally of the 5.4 million children living in institutions in residential care, 80% aren't actually orphans and have families they could go back to. And this is a multi, multi-billion dollar industry. Uh, from numbers that we've seen by the Barnes study, for example, we know it's over$4 billion from the United States from Christians alone every year. That's not counting non-Christians or other countries. So there's a huge amount of money involved in this. And what happens is if you are uh paying to volunteer in general, you're not actually volunteering, you're paying for the volunteer experience. So if you're paying to volunteer with animals, or you're paying to volunteer with orphans, or you're paying to volunteer as a medical professional, you're not really volunteering. You're paying for the experience of doing something that you may or may not be qualified to do. And the vast, vast majority of the time, I'm talking over 95% of the people who are going over and working with orphans and being in orphanages are not qualified to be there and to be doing that. They're paying to have that opportunity. And that generally comes at the expense of the children and their families.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. That's a really important thing that you're pointing out, which is that um I think people who who sign up for these trips who, you know, go onto a website and they say, I'd really love to help out in an orphanage. That sounds like it would be a lot of fun and I'd be doing something really, really good. Um, the fact that they're not actually qualified, say more about like what kinds of qualifications, what would be red flags that that you would say, um, yeah, that's not really something you should be doing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so you know, it's interesting because it's really hard to convince people they're not qualified to do something. You know, whether it's going off of a bike jump that you know they shouldn't be going off of, uh, or you know, some sort of profession, it often we we already believe that we're able to do things. And then what's really difficult about the volunteerism industry is there is a multi-billion dollar industry which is invested in telling you you are qualified to do this thing, just give us some money. And on the other hand, there's a bunch of nonprofits and advocates like ourselves who are screaming from the rooftops, and you know, it's it's hard to compete with the top Google listings and Bing and stuff like that. Um, the first thing to look at is nowhere in the global north has orphanages. So there's no orphanages in the United States, there's no orphanages in Canada, there's no orphanages in Japan, there's no orphanages in Finland. And so that should be your first sort of warning sign of like why aren't there orphanages? And the reason is we know that children do better in family-based care and kinship-based care than they do in institutions, um, especially being involuntarily institutionalized. So that should kind of be your first flag of why am I going to go volunteer working in this sort of system or structure that we don't have in the country that I'm from. The second thing is, are you qualified to do that in your own country? So before you try and do anything anywhere else, uh, especially to pay for it, you should have the skills and abilities that someone would pay you to do it. Right. So if you're an architect and you're a qualified architect and you can get a job as an architect, and you want to go over and volunteer your time somewhere to help them, you know, build a small bridge in a village that gets access faster. That's one thing. If you are an architectural student or a well-meaning college student, or maybe you like to play games with your friends that you think build some skills, you're really not qualified to go over and start building bridges in other countries to kind of full stop. Um, there's this sort of naivety that mixes with good intentions where people think they're qualified to care for children, right? Um, and there is a big difference between, let's say, babysitting your neighbor's kid or volunteering at the uh church school for the child services while children are there or while their parents are in a in a class. And kids who have been institutionalized and have abandonment issues come from entirely different cultures and different structures. So just because you may be qualified to babysit your neighbors, it doesn't mean necessarily that you're qualified to work with kids in a war-torn country, or if their parents are actually dead, have the um plethora of sort of emotional and developmental issues that would go along with that. Add in that this is probably in a foreign country where you don't speak the language or understand the culture, and it's really not to the benefit of those children.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I think those are really important points. Um, so I have a doctorate in education, not to toot my own horn or whatever, but I know a few things about education and I know a few things about learning and um, you know, adolescent and child development, things like that. Um, I am not, I I recognize though, that even though I'm able to do that and I'm able to be employed in those fields in this country, I don't know what the educational system and the place that I'm traveling to is is about. I don't, I don't know that system. And so I think there is something to be said about not only having the expertise, but understanding the context as well, um, and letting the local, you know, the local side lead. Um, I do think orphanages are a place where often people will say, well, you know, uh I have younger siblings or I'm a mom. How hard can it be? These are kids, like, you know, um, and the just basic um the the basic gap between that and the fact that these kids are separated from parents, have suffered multiple traumas. I'm not a social worker, I'm not a counselor. At the time in which I was um volunteering in orphanages, I uh was not trauma-informed trained. Um, and so those are things that I think um to your point, um people just assume a sort of base level of this is all gonna be fine, how how bad could it be? And they don't really have the expertise and training they need at all.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I think there's also this sort of belief that because we have a better education system here in the United States, or maybe uh we have a bit more resources in a lot of these countries, people are thinking that, oh, even at my base level, I'm gonna be qualified to go over to those places. And uh once again, this is generally in the interest of the trip leaders and the people who are profiting off of this to help, you know, reintegrate that idea into the average person. Um, on the other hand, if you were to think if something terrible happened in the United States, right? Uh, you know, it's say like a hurricane or um, you know, a natural disaster and people come and provide aid, you would want qualified people to come and provide the aid. You wouldn't want a bunch of tourists from Norway who are on a gap year or who want to make a vacation out of it and they're gonna post Instagram photos to say, hey, I know how to, you know, provide basic skills and necessities. I understand I had to take first aid. I'm gonna go over there and I'm gonna get my hands on it and I'm gonna touch it and get involved. I think we can all see from the outside that's not towards the benefit, but often when we look at it through our lens of saying, well, I have these skills, I am trained, I did do a little of this, it's gonna be fine. And I really think kind of retouching on what you said, the cultural aspect is so, so, so huge. Um, for me personally, from traveling, just the different worldviews of people, and they just don't match. You know, we're we grow up in the same way that you know, someone from a different town or from a different uh state may see things a little differently. In other countries, just the values that we consider important or uh what we consider taboo or incredibly, you know, kind of forbidden may not even enter our registrar. So, you know, something as simple as your behavior around the children, how you dress, how you talk, if you give them hugs or not, whether or not you're giving them gifts, these can all have an entirely different cultural understanding and have the ability to cause a lot of harm. And that's something I've seen that's really interesting is when you deal with kind of professionals in this field, you know, I deal with, let's say, with a lot of people right now have a call coming up of some people who are experts in Tanzania, and they really say, like, oh, you know, I can work with youth in Tanzania and other sections in this, you know, region in Africa, but I can't do anything in South Asia. You know, I understand some of the basics, but these are so different that I can't get involved. And you hear the same thing. And these people who are experts are knowing they can't deal with these sort of other cultural paradigms and try and pretend to be experts there. And so when you see people often coming from places like the United States or Norway who say, Oh, I can go anywhere, you know, and if you go on these websites, um, you'll see, hey, do you want to volunteer in Kenya? You're welcome. Come to Honduras, come to Tanzania, you know, come to Cambodia, come to Vietnam. All of these places you're qualified with your good intentions, you're ready to help. And if you were to go and talk to the professionals who do this, they would say, Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, I'm not, I'm not qualified to work in these countries. I don't have the necessary cultural understanding. I don't understand the governmental infrastructure. Uh, you know, that's beyond me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. I think it's both culture and context. Um, I I know of carelivers who have shared with me too that like something happens when you have this structure and you've got volunteers coming over on a regular basis and they're getting this sort of curated orphanage volunteer experience, right? Because it's not, they're not actually serving, they're actually having um a curated experience. Um but then kids in the institutions get trained to respond in a certain way, um, to to react in to volunteers in a certain way. And so I've had a careliever say to me um one time, you know, that he was sort of trained in the orphanage to sit on on visitors' laps, to give hugs, to, you know, be physically affectionate, to hold hands, things like that, because that was the expectation of the visitor or the volunteer. Um and but that's not cultural. That's not something that that was culturally normative. And that as an adult, as he's tried to like navigate his life in the in this the setting in which he lives, people didn't people in his community don't don't act like that. That's just that's not a culturally appropriate way to behave.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, uh that's a hundred percent the case. Uh I've encountered youth who, you know, they learn to drink and smoke uh in countries where it's totally acceptable from the volunteers who are there. And like you said, this is kind of a curated experience, right? So if we kind of can really clearly establish that if you're going on these trips uh to work in places that you're not qualified and you're paying to do it, you know, you're the customer and the children are the product. Um, as long as we have that, you know, kind of going forward, you start to see that the business who's facilitating this, they're in the business of keeping the customers happy, not necessarily what's in the best interest of the product, so to speak. Um so you'll you'll see these negative outcomes, unfortunately. And then you'll see that if people go to these orphanages and they're not having a good time and they're not feeling like they're helping, regardless of the reality, they're gonna stop coming and they're gonna stop recommending it to their friends. And something we've seen a lot of that's also really kind of sad is that uh the places that are doing well and have the necessary child protection policies in place and you know are taking care of the children and aren't allowing in, you know, a certain amount of volunteers to visit, people are gonna say, Oh, I I didn't really help. You know, I wish I could have gone somewhere, I wish I could have done more. Whereas the places that are more curated to making the volunteers, you know, feel like they're really helping, like they're the savior of this community, that the children are enacting with them and thanking them and taking the gifts and running home and all of that stuff, those places are gonna see more and more money, um, more and more funders. And that money is not necessarily gonna go to the children, it's not gonna create better outcomes, but it is gonna create the a happy customer, and that's gonna get more buy-ins. Um yeah. So it's something really to be careful for and look for. And it's what also makes this whole thing really difficult to explain to people is often um you have volunteers who have really good intentions and they've gone somewhere and they had a really good experience and they felt like they've made a really positive change and they really helped. Um, and then trying to explain to somebody that no, that may not be the case. You may have actually harmed that place and those children, the cognitive dissonance that we're gonna have to protect ourselves from happening is is staggering. And I've I've seen that happen firsthand. Uh, I've seen uh orphanage directors arrested and put in jail, and heard the people who were donating saying, Oh, this is you know, this is um some sort of campaign by their political enemies or this is a conspiracy. I've had uh similarly, I had a person I talked to who was volunteering in an orphanage who kind of was believing everything was good. And she just started asking some questions after we talked. For example, have you ever seen a social worker? If you're giving this place thousands of dollars a month, how come there's no hot water for the girls? Why did they not do a background check before you're dressing and undressing these girls? Why do you have unfettered access to these children? Why do they take the children and put on, you know, dance shows for visiting people to raise money? And once she started asking these questions, she actually went to the orphanage director and she said, Look, I've been giving you$2,000 a month. I owe you another$2,000. I would like to see where this money is going, you know, the books you have, the sort of finances, so I know that my money is going to the right place. And the guy basically told her to buzz off, right? And if you look at$2,000 in the comparison of this country, Nepal, it's around$100,000 equivalent, right? So imagine going to a nonprofit here and giving them$100,000 a month. And then someone gives you some reasons to think maybe they're not helping, and you go and say, Hey, I want to give you another$100,000, like I've been doing, but I just need to see the money is going somewhere, and they tell you to buzz. So this girl in particular went back. To uh her neighbor who told her to go to this place. And she brought up all of these concerns, you know, what was happening, what was happening to the girls, the fact that some of the girls weren't always there and they didn't know where they were, and it was always just some, oh, they went off and you know, they found family or they did something, but there was no record of that. And the person who sent her uh flipped out at her. He told her that she was a terrible person, that she was a monster, that he had no right to, you know, come up with these questions, and this guy is a saint, right? So it even when it's not a someone who's working as an advocate directly, but someone's neighbor and friend who brings these questions, it's really, really hard to rectify that you may, with your good intentions, be harming the people you're trying to help.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It's a really tough, um, it's a really tough thing to face. I know it was um, it was a moment we experienced in our own journey from supporting an orphanage for more than 10 years to transitioning that orphanage um to a family-based care um model and and getting those kids back into their families. Um the the moment when you have to face that the thing that you built, that you had all the best intentions of doing the right thing may have actually created some harm, caused some harm. Um, that's a really tough thing. And I can understand um people's reluctance to do that, but it's it is terrifying when when confronted with that truth, people's reaction is you know, to to flinch is to is to clutch at uh at the model and and not like go. So we're just gating around this issue of orphanage uh tourism and it's connection to orphanage trafficking. And I think American audiences hear the word trafficking and they're thinking of like girls snatched at the you know, at concerts or, you know, the mall or whatever, and and taken for nefarious purposes or whatever. We have this sort of preconception of what trafficking is. Um, can you just explain a little bit about what is orphanage trafficking and how does orphanage tourism connect to it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So in the talks I've done and you know, being in front of audiences and showing the film, it is a question I get a lot is, you know, like you said, people kind of have the idea that trafficking is someone thrown in the back of a back of a trunk and driven across borders. And I think the easiest way to explain trafficking is simply that trafficking is the use of commerce in something that is illegal, right? So uh drug trafficking, for example, is if I have a pound of weed in my trunk and I move it from one place to another, that was trafficking, regardless of if um, you know, moving it from city to city, state to state, or internationally. What makes the orphan trafficking really complicated as all forms of human trafficking is is the person kind of willing and is it through force, fraud, and coercion? And those are the legal definitions we use in the United States to define trafficking. So, you know, if you have a person who's trying to, let's say, get from Mexico to the United States in order to work and they pay a coyote to bring them over, that's not necessarily trafficking. If, however, the trafficker uses forced fraud or coercion, tells them they're gonna have to work in a field, uh, threatens not to release them or bring them to their family for additional money, that's where the line of trafficking gets crossed. So what we've tried to do, um, and we have a congressman Chris Smith out of New Jersey who proposed a bill, would be to legislate and begin to look at orphan trafficking through force fraud and coercion and to make that illegal. And this is something that's crazy to me, and I have to reiterate, but right now, from the United States perspective, if you are trafficking children through force fraud and coercion from one place to another against their will or against their family's will, or you know, by lying to them about it, the United States doesn't look at that as uh a severe form of trafficking in persons. It's not something we really identify. And there are organizations in the United States that uh make money by trafficking children through forced fraud and coercion into these orphanages and profit off of it. And they've been sued in United States courts and the US has said we don't have the standing to look at it. They may be violating laws in Kenya, they may be violating laws in Nepal, but we're not we're not looking at that. There's there's no kind of uh resource or mechanism that they can use to enforce it. And this makes it really difficult because you kind of have this belief that if you're paying an organization in the United States, whether it's a nonprofit, a prophet, or a church, that they're following some sort of US law and these standards and they just simply don't exist. Uh, but to go back to how can you explain trafficking, generally these children who end up in these orphanages uh are there because they have difficult family situations back home. Often it's poverty, um, sometimes or a lot of times it's war or violent conflict. The problem is not when orphanages are used as what they should be used for, if they're used at all, is a sort of last stop to keep children from ending up in worse situations, being sold into labor or sex, but to help get them um off of the streets and reintegrate them into families. And what we've found is that it's a lot more profitable to collect these children, keep them in the orphanages, sometimes sell them off into the worst situations because no one's really watching it, and then collect the huge income stream coming from donors and tourists uh to those kids. And so that's where we run into this difficulty. And kind of the first thing that you encounter is that no good orphanage, um, and good orphanage is a it's a hard term to use, but no good orphanage is bringing in unqualified volunteers in order to see the children, right? We we know that's not in the best interest of the children. So when that starts to happen, you wonder why. And once they have a financial incentive to get the children into that orphanage and to keep them there and to use them as funding tools, they're gonna lose a lot of their agency. Um, I've personally encountered numerous cases of parents who've come to orphanages trying to get their children back and being refused because the orphanage doesn't want to give up its revenue stream.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Right. Well, and then you get the the the little side um hustle that happens when um bad orphanage directors realize that the that that having children in the orphanage is a way to get money coming in um continuously. And then you get sort of paper orphans. You get kids that, you know, they'll pull in four volunteer groups for, you know, the time the group is in country, um, feed them for a week or whatever, feed them, clothe them for a week, and then as soon as the volunteers leave, you know, out back out on the street they go, or you get full-up paper orphans where, you know, kids are photographed or whatever, their names are changed and and they're just sort of presented as a child you can sponsor, and they're not actually receiving any services from that institution at all.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the really kind of common scam uh that I've encountered is where parents are told that their children are gonna go to sort of private schools that, oh, you know, your kid is so smart and you know, so clever that I can get them a sponsorship into this, you know, really exclusive private school with American teachers, and they'll use photos of unqualified Americans there to say, oh, look at this. You know, this guy's great, and they're gonna teach your kid English. All uh all you have to do is sign over that this kid's an orphan and we'll take them. And so what happens is then that child pretty much legally belongs to the orphanage. Uh that's where the parents aren't able to get them back, but they also get sold, right? So orphanages, I think, are the number three or number two place that leads to further trafficking, to sex trafficking and labor trafficking, right? So if you are, let's say, one of the worst people, you know, who runs this sort of sex trafficking operation and you want to get a group of young boys or young girls, the easiest place to get that is from an orphanage. Here's a bunch of kids who aren't really being looked after, who are already being used as a commodity. And if you have kids who, you know, act out, um, are saying they want to go home or telling the volunteers that they're not really orphans, those are often the first ones to be sent off to somewhere else. And that kind of keeps the other kids in line. And when you look at these orphanages, right? Because I want to really emphasize that not only is this not looked at from the United States, but because of that, a lot of the countries where they're operating don't do an adequate job of making sure that these orphanages are being run correctly. I think it's something like 45% in Uganda and around 40% in Cambodia, and there's similar numbers all around the world of these orphanages have never been visited by a social worker. They may not be registered with the government, right? So all you need to do to open up an orphanage is a website and have some space in order to keep the kids. And if no one's looking out for the well-being of the children and there's so much money gonna come in, you're gonna continue to see what we're seeing, which is this giant influx of entrepreneurs who are making money off of the trafficking of children, often into the orphanages and then sometimes off to worse places as well. Um, this also touches on the whole international adoption thing, as you know. Um, often children are adopted internationally who have families. This just came out in China, it was a major deal. You can't adopt children from Nepal anymore. Ukraine is fighting with it, and it's kind of the same thing we're talking about. You know, if you have this orphanage and you have all of these children and someone's willing to give you$20,$30,000,$40,000 for a specific child, if someone's gonna find that child for you, you know, regardless if they do have a family who loves them or uh anything like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, I think that's 100% true. We know of an organization in um in Sierra Leone that was doing um real legit tracing work on kids in institutional settings and discovering whether or not they had family that wanted them back and whatever for um for I'll say folks from the global north that that came and wanted to adopt Sierra Leone and children. Um, and when they realized that that was gonna make the process harder to get a child, they broke ties with that organization and they just went and found an organization that'll get them a kid really quickly for about$30,000. Um, so yeah. Um what is the biggest myth you think volunteers needed uh tries to confront?
SPEAKER_00:That's a good question. Um I wouldn't necessarily call it a myth, but what I think the biggest thing that needs to be confronted is unintended externalities, um, which is essentially where we're not accounting for what's actually going on besides what's directly in front of us. We often see that in something um in the business world, like let's say we're looking at a utility company, and so we look at the cost of the energy to produce, and then we're looking at how much money it costs, and then we just put in that factor, but we may not be looking at the pollution that this utility company is doing, and if they're dumping the coal in the river and the cost of that to clean up. So there's this whole major externality. And uh with good intentions, there's often where you look at these numbers of okay, well, I'm gonna donate this money or I'm gonna volunteer somewhere and I'm gonna provide this service. And that is what you're thinking of as a closed system, and you're not looking at all of the externalities that are involved, right? So the first and the most obvious one is these kids are being trafficked from their families, and there's a damage that's happening to the families and the communities where they may never return. Uh, the second is what is the actual outcome of these children? Are they going to go to college? Are they going to have careers? Uh, are they gonna end up in drugs or traffic to other places? And then the third, of course, is is this really the best use of my money and my time and my intentions? And I think that's it's something really important to identify. And I think what's so hard about it is going back to this is a multi-billion dollar industry uh that does a really good job of not showing you the externalities, but has an incredibly strong misinformation campaign. Um, if you go online right now, despite the fact you know you're listening to this podcast with us, and there's experts from all around the world who agree with us, and the United Nations has passed stuff on this, uh, and you search volunteer orphanage Uganda, volunteer orphanage uh Cambodia, volunteer orphanage, you know, Honduras, you're going to see dozens and dozens of opportunities which tell you you're highly qualified to come here and that you're doing a good thing, and everyone's profiting off of it, right? The entrepreneurs are profiting off of it, Google is profiting off of it for the advertisements, the politicians are probably getting paid off. There's this huge industry that we never look at and we don't see because we kind of just look at this small part of there's kids who need help, and I have the ability to help money in my savings account. And it's better if I do that than you know spend it on just a vacation, or if I'm gonna go on vacation, I might as well do something good to make the world a better place. And that's often unfortunately where you have this sort of uneducated consumer, you have it where they're being taken advantage of as well as the children.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. That actually brings me to a really um to something I was really struck with when I watched your film. Um, and that is, I mean, we're talking about, you know, the kids and and being victimized by this entire system. And that's, you know, that's all clear. But I was struck too by the interviews that you did with um with volunteers that talked about, and these are really well-intentioned people who genuinely wanted to do something. Um, and that's like that's an impulse you want to encourage in people, right? Um, genuinely want to do something to make the world a better place, are thinking to themselves, you know, who who needs that help the most? Vulnerable children, you know, like you've said before, is kind of the gold standard of, you know, where that good needs to go. And and they invest their time, invest their money, go and travel to a place um with all the best intentions, and then come to the realization that I'm not really I'm not really having a great impact. I might actually be contributing to something that's darker. Um, and it struck me when I was watching it the first time they're they're kind of victims in this whole thing too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. Um and this is something that a lot of people it takes. I always say that this issue is something that needs to be dealt with with a scalpel and not a hammer. Um, a lot of people initially want to go in and they want to blame the volunteers because they're the ones funding this, or they want to blame the families because they're the ones who gave up their children, etc., etc. Um, but this is a really complicated situation. And generally the people who are trying to help are good people who are spending their hard money to do something, and it's really easy to sit and judge, you know, from our couches and say, oh, what an idiot. You know, I would never do something like that and look how they're harming. Well, this person put in effort to try and change the world and make it better. Um, there are bad actors out there. I don't think I interviewed any, but you know, like I said, we we there's multiple cases of convicted pedophiles who travel to these countries because there is no protection, you don't need a background check, who go over and they harm kids. But I'd say 99% of the people who are going are really going because they're trying to take to make the world a better place. And these people are in general duped. Um, they're patsues, they're suckers. They are told, hey, you have a pocket full of cash and you want to make a difference. I have a difference you're gonna make. Just come over here and we'll do it. And then once they get a little bit deeper and they realize they're they've been duped, they have no recourse. Um, they can't go to people in the country, they can't go to people in the United States because the United States or their country doesn't have any regulations on it, and they often go home kind of feeling like they've been fleeced. And that is also kind of sad. Um, they're another victim in this entire situation. And I think this kind of goes back to the what are you qualified to do? I've encountered volunteers who've made really big differences going places. Um, I met this girl, for example, who she works for a nonprofit in the United States, and she reached out to a similar environmental nonprofit in Nepal, and she said, Hey, here's what I do. These are the systems I work in. I'd like to come over and volunteer. And they said, That would be great. We can even find a place for you to stay. Obviously, she didn't pay them anything. They uh found a really cheap apartment, you know, way better than we could find as foreigners. And then she taught them how to do, you know, to what us might seem more normal, stuff like using Google Docs or complying with uh, you know, new systems, how to write for grants in order to get those money. And that was an example of someone who had a skill in the United States and took over and applied that skill and didn't pay money to do it. And in those things, you really can see the measurable differences. It's when you're throwing money at a problem that you don't understand trying to solve it, that you're really putting yourself in a position to be taken advantage of. Um, and it's sad because I think some of these people, uh one in particular I'm thinking of, had wanted to make this sort of their life goal and working with these sort of vulnerable children. And once they realized what was going on, they shifted completely and tried to find a different career. Because why would you want to try and get involved in something where you've already been fleeced as a young person and you realize was very corrupt?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I was thinking too. You know, once you you're the scales frolled from your eyes, so to speak, or whatever, that you would feel so betrayed and and just used, and you know, that's driving you in the direction we don't want you to go. Um what was the hardest part of making this film? Either logistically or emotionally, ethically, what just what was what was difficult for you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so uh you know, the hardest part is probably on the production side. So um I I talked to you about this before. I was very naive. I thought that I was going to uh make this film, put it on public access television, the world was gonna change overnight and I'd go about my life. So I've been working on this for 10 plus years. Um, I unfortunately didn't set up any sort of funding thing. In fact, I thought it would be wrong to because I was trying to fight the people who are making money off of orphans. So I thought if I did a Kickstarter or did a GoFundMe, it wouldn't make me any better. That being said, I've been doing this for 10 years. Um, the time I do it, I'm not getting paid. It's time I take away from my family, from my actual job. And then everything costs money, you know. So I'm working on this with passion, but you know, there's editors and subtitles and sound mixing and color matching and all of that costs money. Uh, if you want to apply to go to a film festival, you know, they charge$50 to$100 a pop. And if there is a better, easier way to do it, I don't know what it is. But I'd say that's been really a big struggle is how do you get this message out there and how do you compete with a multi-billion dollar industry if you don't have the capital to take out advertisements? You know, I've had a couple of newspaper articles about me, and um, I've been really fortunate in meeting with people from ATIP and international parliamentarians and congresspeople. But you know, when you're trying to get a congressman to pay attention, uh, it helps when you have money and you have the backing of an organization. When you're trying to get resolutions passed, it helps when you have a larger voice. And without the finance behind that, that's really difficult. Um, so I'd say first that would be the kind of the hardest because it's been the longest term. The second is how do you get a message to people that is gonna make them care and understand and do something? And that's something I'm still struggling with is, you know, this is an issue most people have never heard of. Um, when I go to rotary meetings or I put on private screenings or I go to schools, the vast majority of people never knew that this was an issue. And then they're gonna walk away knowing it's an issue. But how do you empower them to do something besides just not a volunteer in an orphanage? How do we empower people to go out and make a stand, whether that's writing a letter to a congressman or telling their friends about it or making this something that we can actually start to reintegrate this five plus million children? Um, And that's been something I still struggle with. You know, it's uh I haven't figured out what is the right step to both educate people, but then, you know, awareness is great. There's a lot of documentaries about, you know, raising awareness on stuff, but awareness isn't going to be enough, right? Like awareness of a disease isn't going to cure the disease. It might help keep more people from getting infected. But we need to actually work on inoculating our society from this kind of human trafficking.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Gosh, you're really you're speaking, um, you're speaking to the choir, preaching to the choir on this because um our our our listeners know we're working on a documentary film too, and it's been years, and it's really, really hard. The funding piece is um is a huge shock to the system. And it's really hard when you're a small filmmaker, when you're a small nonprofit trying to make a film, um, and you're up against an industry that's um, as you said,$4.5 billion a year. Christians are spending, just American Christians are spending to support orphanages somewhere in the global south and arguing against that. Um, you've got Netflix is airing a documentary, it's a really feel-good documentary about a really pretty orphanage with really talented kids, and you're up against that, um, that kind of thing when, you know, that's the kind of film that's going to make people feel really good about themselves and feel really, really good about the pretty story or whatever. And the stories we're trying to tell are certainly not stories that are are are pretty. I mean, we're actually, I said to somebody, you know, what I think we're trying to do with our film is to open your eyes to a problem you didn't know existed and then put that problem in your lap. And to your point, the pivot isn't necessarily stop doing X. It's do Y instead. And like giving people, empowering people with something that they can do that feels positive, that feels like um they can they can feel good about themselves or be, you know, feel good about getting engaged. And it's really, really hard.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And you know, like you said, it it is, it's not and I'd like to find a way to turn it into, but it's not a feel-good documentary. Uh this isn't uh a problem with the nice bow we can tie around it, or we can say, Oh, look, and we figured it out, this you know, this problem is solved. And that makes people less likely to want to watch it. It's not something you necessarily want to sit and watch on your couch, but it also you know makes it so it's something that it makes us uncomfortable, and we generally don't like to feel um uncomfortable. So getting that in front of people and having them sort of confront these biases, and then you know, the even more uncomfortable thing is a lot of people are contributing to this problem, right? Like$4.5 billion is a lot of money. There is millions of people who are giving that money, and I I think it's something around three million Americans, or around 1%, have gone and volunteered in in orphanages, they've actually put their hands on that, right? Um, that's a lot of people who don't want to be told, hey, you're hurting kids. Um, you know, so getting people to take that and then shift their entire view of what's going on, um, it's difficult because this is something that it is, it really is so ingrained in us that helping orphans is like the best thing we can do. And I still agree we should we should help orphans. Um, it's just how we do it. Yeah, the industry which has come about doing it is less about helping orphans and more about making money for itself, and that's kind of the danger of industry. And I think this is, you know, kind of to to recap what we're talking about, you know. Um, I put the majority of my energy, I I've been to to my own horn now. Uh, I want to say incredibly successful um for what I've done. I'm not a politician, I'm not a paid lobbyist, but we have proclamations passed in numerous cities in California. We actually have another one that's supposed to be passed tomorrow. Uh, I've gotten in front of congressmen. I have a congressman from New Jersey who wrote a bill to address this issue, who I talked to directly. Um, you know, I we've had some real, real major successes, but that's because I'm not, you know, I'm not out there fundraising, right? All of the time I have that I'm putting into this, I am putting into how can I get actual legislative change happening and doing it. And unfortunately, you know, that leaves out the arm of how do I make more money on this? How do I raise it? How do I make a living? And this is kind of what you encounter is the people who are really helping kids, they don't have the really good website, they don't have the good search engine optimization, they don't have all of the successful ties with the business leaders where they're bringing over a steady stream of volunteers every week or every month, right? Like those are the places that have really capitalized on the business of it. And so it's very difficult for, you know, if your bottom end goal is the benefit of the children, obviously you're not gonna be spending enough time focusing on finances or focusing on outreach. Um, and that's kind of the the double-edged sword is the ones you're gonna encounter, the ones who you're probably gonna be giving money to, the ones who are gonna be the ones who are the ones who are paying Google to be on the top of those listings aren't the ones who meet the standards for for children.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. And it's it's interesting because I I really appreciate you talking at the top of this this particular piece about you know not wanting to fundraise for the film and wanting to, you know, not pump more money into the industry and and what have you. But I do think that stories like yours are stories that need to be out there. They're they're stories that need to get told and people need to hear them if we're ever gonna reach a tipping point um that gets us over this hunt. Because as you said, I mean, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child came out what almost 40 years ago. Um, and and countries all over the planet, over 260 countries, ratified um and signed on to that. And so making that a practical reality is gonna take some kind of tipping point um in order for for real change to happen. So, and I think you know, getting stories like this, these uncomfortable stories out there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think one of the issues that we've encountered a lot is often there is this legislation, but there's not the correct avenues for implementation, right? So in Nepal in particular, and um they have rules against this. It's illegal to volunteer in an orphanage on a tourist visa, it's illegal to traffic these children in there. It's just the pure amount of money, it's just like a wave that you can't fight. Um, if you're if it's illegal to volunteer on a tourist visa, but you're still paying someone$2,000 a month to do it, which is once again around the equivalent in that country of$100,000, uh, they're gonna find a way to get you in. You know, they're gonna make sure the right people get money and paid off, and they're gonna make sure they have those kids. Um, you know, so just because there is a sort of legislation that's there, there needs to be proper implementation measures. And this is why I do think that the bill which we have proposed by Congressman Chris Smith is so important. It would consider orphan trafficking a form of severe form of trafficking in persons. And then at least the United States, and hopefully other countries will pass some more legislation, could go to them and say, hey, look at this. You know, 45% of your orphanages have never been visited by a social worker. We have numbers that these kids are being trafficked to other places. If you want to keep getting US money, then you're gonna have to fix this and you're gonna have to step into it. Whereas right now they may have laws that it's illegal and you're not supposed to do it. But if there's a law with no implementation mechanism, and at the same time you're making a little money on the side from the people who are paying you either in like side taxes or for permits or whatever, you have no motivation to stop it. Um that's something that we really have to start increasing is this sort of uh lever that we can push and pull as well-meaning citizens and civilians about this. Because as of now, you can go over to a country, find kids are being trafficked, report it and yell it from the the rooftops, and nothing's gonna be done about it. Except you might end up in my documentary.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. All right. Um, did making the film change your understanding of what help or mission or service meant? And if so, in what ways?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Um I think when I I want to reiterate when I started this film, um, I wasn't trying to make a film about volunteerism or orphan trafficking. I wanted to ride motorcycles and drink beer with my best friend and talk about philosophy with monks staying in the monasteries, and volunteering was just a small side of it. And when I first encountered this issue, I was like most people who was pretty reluctant to believing that this is the industry that exists. I had assumed that the orphanage from the woman I was talking to, where she had paid money to be there, and the orphanage director was arrested, and all the kids were crying to her that they wanted to go home and they weren't really orphans, was like one bad orphanage out of the hundreds that I'd ridden by or seen or heard of. Um, it took a while for me to understand that this is an industry and this isn't kind of the outlier of the industry. This is the normal, how it's functioning, how it's working, not just in Nepal, not just in India, but pretty much the entire world. Um, so that obviously caused a very big shift in me in my understanding about orphanages and childcare and the professional standards that should be required in order to provide that. But I think what really kind of opened my eyes was how hard it is to see the truth when there are multi-billion dollar industries engaged in keeping you from seeing that truth. And while I focus on the orphanage trafficking and um orphanage tourism, because that's sort of where I've become an expert, it's been really interesting to see how many other ways that overlays uh in aid, for example, but also just in our regular consumerism. As consumers, we want to buy things, um, whether it's a new phone or a laptop or a shirt. And there's in general, the most successful places at selling you these things have done a really good job of building up their capital and their industry in a way that they're providing the product to the consumers. And one of the things that's involved in that is not letting them see how the sausage gets made. And so uh looking at the amount of you know, not just obviously consumer products, we all or most people know about fast fashion or that a lot of chocolate uses slavery, and that, you know, large companies have paid millions and millions of dollars to lobby against stopping slavery in the chocolate trade, but also an aid, you know, a lot of these, you know, whether it's uh an animal shelter or it's uh an orphanage or it's providing you know food and t-shirts for people in Africa, a lot of these things exist not to actually provide care toward the end-term beneficiaries because they started bringing in so much money that that becomes their main interest. And so looking at that um through a kind of new paradigm or a new lens of okay, you know, I want to help animals or I want to provide clothing to the unclothed, or I want to help the orphan and the sick and the widow. And how can you really know that you're helping those people and your money is going to the right place when this large industry has the ability to uh capitalize on the Google results when you search, to control the narrative inside of television programs, to get, you know, their documentaries made, which make lots of money and feel good, and then they can raise more money off of it on things like Netflix. Uh, and then how do you actually get the truth out there? You know, because the truth is more of a whisper. And that's something um that's really opened my eyes, obviously, not just to orphan trafficking, but to the entire world around me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So we talked a little bit about red flags. Um if I'm somebody that wants to travel somewhere and do some do some actual real good, what what kinds of green flags would you give to churches or individuals that are evaluating opportunities like that that would that would say yes, this you could you could potentially provide some benefit here?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um so just to reiterate on the the red flags. So there's gonna be red flags for every industry and every position. Like, you know, obviously if you want to go over and build a wall or a well, that's good. But you know, is your money like could you just build it if you gave a tenth of the money that you're you're raising? Um, in the orphan trafficking childcare space, the ones I'm the most familiar with, it's really unless you're a qualified professional, you shouldn't be doing it once you've already looked past that and you're gonna do it anyway. Did they require a background check? Uh, do you see regular social workers? Do you have to have any skills or qualifications in order to do this? Do you have unsupervised access to the children? Are you able to take them one-on-one on trips? Are you dressing the kids? Are you with them in their bedrooms? Um, from a cultural context, are you doing things, for example, holding the kids, wearing tank tops, things that which might be completely inappropriate? And then what's your behavior around them? Those are all sort of the major red flags. Uh, if an organization is going to have these much higher standards, that would be a green flag. When you start looking at other things, because there is, you know, there's so many mission trips, there's so many kind of volunteer international um opportunities, that in itself is a very, very big industry. Uh the big thing to wonder is are you paying for this opportunity? And if you weren't paying, would they invite you over with open arms, right? Um, so to go back to the example of being an architect or babysitting, um, if you were gonna pay your neighbor to babysit their kids, that should bring up some major, major red flags, right? Uh, if you were gonna do it for free because you're friends, you know, that's that's something that you'd say, okay, wow, you know, then that person's helping out. And more likely than not, they're gonna pay you to babysit. Same with dog watching or mowing the lawn. If if you were to just go over to this country without, you know, the without the guided trip or the the group that you're looking at, would you be welcomed with open arms to provide these skills because you're you know an artisan in this industry that you're gonna provide? Um, if the answer is no from the get-go, you probably shouldn't be doing it. The the second thing to really look at is are you actually creating long-term change in a trained populace? Are you kind of doing one short-term thing, right? Like if you think, oh, I'm gonna go over and build a well, you know, it's not like we invented building wells here. They know how to build wells. Um, and are they learning the skills to build the wells, right? Because if you're going over with the trained architect from the United States to build this well in, you know, let's say Honduras or in Kenya, are they gonna be able to use these skills to build more wells after you're gone? Are you actually training the people on what they need to know in order to build houses for themselves? Or are you just going and you're building a house and you're gonna get some photos and you're gonna move on? Um, and then of course, you know, I've seen houses built in in other countries which wouldn't meet their standards. For example, you know, the typical form of like construction in America uses a lot of materials that we don't have there. They're not very good for adaptive cooling, they're energy intensive. Um, none of these things are actually positive in foreign countries. Similarly, you might make you know a room for, oh, there's a room for every child, but everyone in this culture slips in you know, one kind of large communal room. So there's all of those things to be aware of. But the main one is, you know, you're only really helping if you're helping to provide an infrastructure which will be sustainable without your help, right? So I've seen a really beautiful hospitals um built by the Japanese where everything's in Japanese and no one can read it and no one can understand it, and you know, you can't even read what insulin is or penicillin, and they don't have the electricity that are running their refrigerators, and these things just remain abandoned, right? And um, you have to make sure you're not doing something like that. If you have some important skill, if you have something you can do, like let's say you were, you know, this childcare professional and you are a social worker and you really know what you're doing, you're not good to go over there and help play with the kids and institute your skills there. What you'd be qualified to do is you go over and you work with the trained professionals who are there and you teach them about you know trauma-informed care, you teach them about different forms of you know learning and literacy, you you teach kind of new strategies that they can use that ideally they can spread, and this becomes long-term sustainable. Similarly, if you're part of this mission trip, if you're part of um you know, IVHQ or something you're paying for, you know, you should be a an expert in what it is that you're doing, and you want to be teaching the people over there how they can be doing that thing without your help, so it continues to perpetuate.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and something, you know, once again to go on externalities. There's so many things that we have done uh trying to help that have been really negative for the outcome in that place. Something that comes to mind is like for USAID, for example, there's a lot of uh foot and mouth disease with these pigs in Haiti. So the United States uh went over and we killed all the native pigs, and then we brought over US pigs that were going to be healthier. Well, it turned out that those pigs couldn't drink the water, so they, you know, and they couldn't eat the native food. And so this became really expensive, and it became a huge drain on uh the people, and that's something no one kind of foresaw or looked at happening. And so you want to work with the people on the ground, and then you don't just go in and you change the system, you say, okay, how can we potentially improve this? You know, how could we have reduced the amount of foot and mouth transmission among those pigs? How can we get it so the people who are there maybe gain some skills and abilities from the technical expertise we're bringing over rather than let's bring over a lot of unqualified people to do something that we could be paying the local people to do, and then let's just do that and leave? Because if you do build a well, who's gonna maintain it? You know, who do they have on the ground? Yeah, who's gonna go on the ground and be able to fix it? Are they gonna have to keep coming back asking for money on it? And that's not what you want is to create a dependent group. You want to have people who, you know, are able to be self-sustaining without our help, and then we go over and maybe we provide some new skills and some new abilities and they learn something, and then they can keep going without us continuing to be involved.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Right. I'm not that telling our um, we have allies on the ground and on a social work team that um that the that the ultimate goal is that we that we're no longer needed, that that we're irrelevant um and that and and we don't need to come anymore. Um and so I think you know, to your point about just if about building into sustainable infrastructure, and we've gotten to the point now where we don't send, even if we if you're a social work expert here in the United States, we don't send you over to train social workers in Africa. We send you to do a kind of um exchange. So you are a professional social worker from the United States, you sit with professional social workers from Africa, um, and you exchange ideas about how to practice um social work in this context. Um and our goal is that those traveling over from the United States are learning as much as they are teaching because it's a context they're not familiar with, it's a culture they're not familiar with, there are there are resources on limitations they're not familiar with, there are resources actually and assets that exist in that space that they're not familiar with. And so for that to be a kind of, you know, we're colleagues and we're learning from each other, and how can we improve our practice um going both ways is is sort of what we're more interested in. Um and again, to your point about that just creating a more sustainable, how can we help build your capacity, learn from you? Um, all of that. It's really important.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So something I've discussed a lot, not on this podcast, is I often think of the example of like a chef, right? Like most gap year students are would be like they're entering their sort of uh trainee stage or their journeyman stage of what they're gonna do in the world and how they're gonna participate. And we often go with this idea of like, I'm gonna change the world, I'm gonna make it better, I'm gonna put my hands on it. And I like to think like, what if you have like A chef from America who was like, you know, I'm gonna go over to Japan and I'm gonna teach them all about how to cook fish and you know, I'm gonna show them how to be better. Yeah, I'm gonna teach them how to be better cooks with the skills that I have from America, right? And you'd laugh at them because it's silly. If they really wanted to be the best chef in the world and they wanted to change the world through their cooking, they'd go over to Japan and they would learn how Japan cooks and what kind of different styles they use and what different ingredients and how they view culinary cuisine different than we do. And then they would come back and they would institute that in their own cuisine, and then if something became successful, right, they would say, Oh wow, you know, this might work, and then Japan would end up re-integrating it on its own. You know, they did that with, for example, with uh salmon sushi. That wasn't native Japan. That's something that people figured out they liked in other countries, and Japan said, Yeah, this is great. Let's let's get the salmon in our sushi. And so similarly, when people are going over to provide care, you know, they're going over and they're saying, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna change the world. I'm gonna have it meet my standards of what it is. And if you really did, like if this is your life mission and you want to help orphans and you want to help vulnerable children, you should go over and be part of this like exchange program like you're talking about. And you work as a professional, as a social worker who's working in country and you see how things are done, and you bring your sort of skills and abilities. And ideally, you get someone from over there to do an exchange with your organization and then when your skills and abilities, and then when you come back, you know, you're gonna come back with new skills and abilities that you didn't have that will make you a better social worker in the United States because you've just gained this huge wealth of experience that wasn't available to you, and it's not in any college or university, and you can continue to use that and develop that as a professional. And as you do, if you do decide to return to that country, they're gonna listen a whole lot more, you know. And that's something that I have seen done. There are some groups out there who really exemplify this. Learning service is one of them. That, you know, this isn't some quick change, you go in, you knock out, you show everybody to wash their hands and the problem solved. You know, this is you need to learn about what you're trying to do. And I think this is such an important part that, you know, if you're traveling, um, whether you're on a mission trip or you're on a you know, volunteurism, or if you're just backpacking like I was reading philosophy, if you're going out there with the idea of you're gonna try and change the world, especially in the journeyman part of your career, you're doing it wrong. You need to go out there with the idea of letting the world change you. You know, look at how people do things differently. And instead of always having a closed-minded about it, if they just do it because they're you know primitive or they haven't learned the way, let it change your perception and your understanding of how you deal with the world. And then you when you return home, see if you can reintegrate that. And that's what I think the real beauty of traveling is. You know, like uh Marco Polo, right? Like he brought pasta back to Italy. We all love pasta, right? If he would have just insisted on bringing Italian cuisine to the Chinese, the whole world would be at a loss, right? It's going over there and learning what you can from other people and bringing that home. And if you do that and you go from being a journeyman to a master, you can then take those skills and those abilities and you can share it with others. And I think that's really how you're gonna get meaningful change. That's really how you're gonna get to see the world improve. It's not from this sort of quick action, in and out, two weeks, uh, made the world a better place.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I'm gonna sit with this one for a while. This um you said um it's not necessarily about going out and changing the world, it's letting the world change you. And I think that's gonna be the nugget I take away from this conversation. Um so what's next for you and for volunteers needed? Where do you want it to go?
SPEAKER_00:So I I want to see legislative change. Um, I think that's really important. So I compare this often to the Protect Act of 2003. And for those who don't know, until 2003, it was legal for people from the United States to go to foreign countries and uh sleep with underage children. You know, you could go on Vietnam uh to Vietnam on vacation, and then if you happened to sleep with a 12-year-old, sure you were breaking the law there. But if you came home, nothing you did was illegal. It was all all fine and forgiven, as long as you didn't intentionally go over with that goal. Uh that changed in 2003. That was a law that we passed, and it helped change the standard of what was acceptable and who could be charged for these things. And you couldn't just come back and tell your buddies that you slept with a 16-year-old on vacation, right? Like now you were you were a criminal, you were breaking the law. Um, similarly, uh orphan trafficking is a thing that isn't legislated, it isn't looked at, it isn't regulated. And as much awareness as we create, we're not gonna see real change until we actually get something on the books, um, either in California or in the United States, where we say, hey, you can't traffic children for profit through force fraud and coercion. Like that's not okay anymore. We're not gonna let that happen. And I think when we get that change in, we're gonna start to see a lot of real positive influence, not only from you know the organizations who can now be held accountable if they're doing it, but from the volunteers who now can say, oh wait, I know this is illegal. I know there's minimum standards. This is something we need to have in place to protect these people. Um, so that's my big goal. So I'm hoping that we can get, you know, we'll have these proclamations passed. I'm working with uh Gail Palerin, who is a California Assembly member. I'm working with Chris Smith, who is a New Jersey uh congressman, to have that change. And the the big thing I'm trying to do with Volunteers Needed is I'm trying to use it as uh a facilitator-led educational platform. So before I started this documentary and a little after, I uh I also worked as an educator. I've been um an educator in New York. I worked as a nonprofit with inner city youth, and I've worked as a substitute teacher in California and Hawaii. So when I made this film, I made it 36 minutes, under 40 minutes, because I wanted to have it as something that could be shown in a classroom and we could start these conversations not just about orphan trafficking, but about misinformation and negative externalities. So I would like to develop that as something that we could use in classrooms that you know, teachers can do either if they're not there or if they just want to introduce it as something in like a civics class. Uh and then similarly, I'm actually I have a phone call after this, and then another one later in this week. I'm trying to work with the major uh US university to create a curriculum for college students. And I think, you know, we're talking about the future leaders of the world. We're talking about people who are going to go out and make change. And if they can become aware not just of orphanage tourism, but about the many negative externalities and dealing with massive misinformation campaigns and huge industries which are profiting off of keeping people from knowing what's going on. Um, I think that we could start to see more activism and more change in that way. Ideally, not just about the orphan trafficking, but also just the huge amount of things which are negatively affecting the world.
SPEAKER_02:All right. One last question. It's been great to have you on the show, Barack. But I have one last question we always ask, and that's what keeps you optimistic about the work you're doing.
SPEAKER_00:So the big thing is um, you know, stuff like this, like you know, you reached out to me out of nowhere to do this podcast, and I consider that a success. And uh I think if you were just to look at from the outside, the documentary I did, right? Like, here's some guy who went to another country with a Costco camera and his best friend, and now he has an award-winning documentary and he has a bill in Congress and multiple past proclamations. And I just came back from France where they showed my documentary, you know, what a success, you know, what a straight path. And that's not the case. Um, I've wanted to quit dozens and dozens of times. And the amount of effort and energy, you know, and no blood, but sweat and tears that have gone into this thing is is a lot. And sometimes it's just from you know, people reaching out to you saying, Hey, we want to have you on our podcast, or we'd like to have you come and talk to our group, or you should, you know, you should apply to this film festival. We'll get you in. We're not gonna charge you. Um, you know, these sort of campaigns, these nuggets, they give you the energy to keep going. And, you know, I'd say what kind of makes me an optimist about this, about really believing that we're gonna make actual genuine change on the orphan trafficking issue, is that there's other optimists who've reached out to me and said, I like the work that you're doing, I want to help. You know, um I I've had people, I had a I was on the front page of a newspaper. Like I said, I haven't done any fundraising, I haven't applied for any grants. And some someone uh who asked for man anonymous just reached out to me and said, Hey, I want to give you some money. I appreciate what you're doing, you know. That was huge. That was the first time anyone has said, I would like to give you money to help what you're doing, so you're just not paying out of your pocket. Yeah. Um, you know, other optimists, other people who want to see the world a better place, you know, coming to you and helping and working with you and providing their skills is really that's what keeps me hopeful that uh we're gonna get things done. And that, you know, this whole 10 years is it's really just uh steps forward towards actual, you know, helping millions of children around the world.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks, Barack. That's a good word.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you very much for having me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest romance, you can find us at Helping Children Worldwide on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Hashtag Optimistic Voices Podcast.
Dr. Laura Horvath
Host
Dr. Melody Curtiss Cathey
Host
Emmanuel M. Nabieu
Host
Yasmine Vaughan
Host
Elana Childress
Co-host
Natalie Turner
Co-hostPodcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
Think Global, Do Justice
Canopy International