Investigation of the Exploitation of Akha Children

some good points
You have a lot of good points, and I think that the success of what is going on there is in its subtelty. david and asa live decently, but they don't live like kings. the children work, but they aren't being beaten or starved. the children themselves are, in their own way, happy. but what is going on in the center is made worse by looking at other places in the region. i was at first worried that i was judging the place by american standards, not thai standards, and i'm the first to say kids dont need a roomful of toys to be well treated. but my brother and I also went to another place, the camillion social center, that takes in hill tribe children just north of Chiang Rai, and that illustrated better than anything the problems with the akha training center. at the camillion center, the children came in when they were old enough for school, and after their primary schooling had the option of going onto secondary schooling or for technical training. most of the kids had ID cards. they helped with chores, but there was always adult supervision and adult staff to look after the kids. there were less than 200 children, with way more staff, and the kids went home on holidays to see their families. At the Akha training center, kids were brought in at all ages, well before school and kept there even after their primary schooling. the older kids only went to school one day a week and basically ran the center the rest of the time. and some children as older than 10 who were deamed 'not ready' for school didn't go at all (though one volunteer mentioned some order from the government saying all of the kids over 10 would have to start going to school, so that is about to change). they didn't have ID cards, because it was 'near impossible' to get them, even though the other boarding school was able to. one of the volunteers told me that the kids were getting job training, but then said they might not be able to use them because most of the kids didn't have ID cards so were just going to go back to their villages anyway. I admit that I don't know the whole situation, where the kids come from, when they leave, how the money comes in, but the suspicious part of it all is that no one knew. not a single person was able to tell me. this allows for a fair bit of speculation, even hyperbolic speculation (which the best of us are guilty of from time to time). david and asa are able to make a decent living by packing in as many children as possible, and not hiring any staff, but keeping the older children on to raise the younger children, build/upkeep the facilities and so forth. this is odious in its self, but becomes all the more so because the money could be spent to help the villages so that the children, who are so very desperate for the slightest attention when you go there, can grow up with their families and in their own culture. instead of helping the villages and preserving their culture, they are using the charity to destroy it, something david, amazingly enough, admits to openly (he said the akha culture was sick and needed to be destroyed). these people are able to make a comfortable living, have children who cook and clean up after them and run a fair bit of the business, are helping to destroy a people and culture already beset on all sides, and they do so in the name of christianizing and charity. yes, it could be a lot worse. but it could also be a lot better, and i have to wonder if some of the international doners saw the difference of say, the (also christian) Camillion social center, and the Akha training center, they would feel so good about what they were doing. it is unfortunatly much harder to fight against the forces of westernizing indigenous cultures, because most charities are based on the premise that we can help people by making them more like us.