Dr Kathryn E. van Doore is an international child rights lawyer and director at the Australian charity Forget Me Not. Her research has unveiled a horrible truth that more than 80% of children in orphanages have families and parents and are a victim of child trafficking.
Forget Me Not Australia works with local governments in Nepal, India and Uganda to change policies about orphanages and spread awareness about this issue.
Their task is to prevent children and young people from being displaced and to keep children within their families and communities.
We sat down with the Andrea and Mel from Forget Me Not to learn more about how children become trafficked into orphanages and the work Forget Me Not are doing to stop this.
Left to right: Andrea Nave and Mel Manly.
Introducing Andrea Nave, CEO of Australian Charity Forget Me Not. We asked Andrea about Forget Me Not and how it all started.
Andrea says, "We opened our doors to six little girls back in 2006. Thinking we were doing the right thing, we opened an orphanage. And our orphanage numbers grew and grew and grew until we had a nice, healthy, award winning orphanage. That is, until we found out the nasty truth that those children had families and had been moved from their families for good people like us to sponsor them. So we turned it all around, found their families, and sent those children home. Now, that's the modern day Forget Me Not. We work to get children back to families."
We also spoke with Mel Manly, founding member of Forget Me Not and fierce advocate. We asked Mel about her role at the charity and how children become trafficked.
Mel says, "Well, the role I play, it's varied. I do everything and anything that needs doing. So probably my biggest role is to help increase awareness that orphanages are not a place for children and that they belong in families. So I'm an advocate, I help fundraise, I am an auntie to many, many of the girls, and I support Andrea in her role as CEO."
Mel continues to discuss how children become trafficked in the first place, she says, "what happens is a lot of the children that end up in orphanages come from remote regions where education, it's not like Australia. It's a privilege to go to school over in Nepal.
So, there's a lot of uneducated people in these regional places. Child traffickers head up into these remote areas in Nepal, and offer the chance of education. Families give up their life savings to these people who look like they're from the government. They've got all the ID, they've got all the papers, et cetera, to say, we're from the government, give me all your money and I'll take your child and educate them in Kathmandu, and they can become a doctor or a lawyer and support you in your old age.
However, what actually happens is the family's hand over the money., do a thumbprint to say, there you go, because a lot of them can't read and write, or it's a different dialect, and they never see their kids again. They go off with these child traffickers and get sold to an orphanage, who then use them as an asset and treat them just as chattel."
This is a complex issue and cannot be solved overnight. We asked Forget Me Not CEO Andrea Nave how the charity is working to change this horrible reality.
Andrea says, "We work with the Nepal government to assess orphanages. We go with them, have a look around and see what's going on. Many of them are running very below par. We then make an assessment for the government and those orphanages get closed down. We take on some of those children. We spread the work amongst other organizations in Nepal, but we take on some of those children and we nurture them back to health.
They come to our transit home, which is called Shakti Ghar, which means the house of power. And they're allowed to be kids. They play in our playground. They eat good food. They sleep till they're not tired anymore. They eat till they're full. They wear clean clothes. They really relax and really calm down a lot. During that time, our reintegration workers and our social workers talk with them, and it helps build their case and their background story.
Armed with that information from the children themselves, our team goes out to the remote areas, hidden valleys and mountains, streets, and heavy truckways, searching for families, families of these children who've been relinquished for often the purpose of good education. We look for those families. We find those families. We prepare the family and the child, and then the magic happens. That's where you guys come in. That takes funds".
Mel continues to tell us a bit more about the process of reuniting kids with their families. "What happens is, once we are able to do a rescue, often with the Nepali government, the children are taken from the orphanage and brought to a home where they can settle down and we can start the process of learning. Where are you from? Do you remember your parents?
It depends on the age of the kids, some of these kids might be six months old, some of them might be 15. So to help them remember where they're from, we encourage them to paint pictures, they can talk about the textiles, if they remember their face shape and whatnot, this information gives a good clue as to where they might be from.
Our reintegration officers are awesome. They spend their lives dedicated to finding out where these kids are from and researching and researching and researching and finding families. They will hike for days and days on end, months sometimes, to find their families, and then they'll start that slow process of reintegration, perhaps it's just a phone call to a mum. This process takes a bit of time. We also need to do a psychological evaluation, we need to do a health evaluation, educational evaluation, to learn how do we best support these kids to be supported by their families. So sometimes the families then require a little bit of help from us, be it education or up-skilling, so they can get another trade, so that they can then support their children in their homes."
We asked Andrea what are some of the core issues they are hoping to solve.
"We're working to solve the issue that poverty is what makes families relinquish their children for the price of an education. And that price that they pay through giving their children up to orphanages is a price too high, because children pay with their childhoods."
"Our work is to reconnect children to their families and then work out ways, unique and otherwise, to keep those children at home through providing great educational opportunities. Sometimes the family needs basics like, like foods and clothes to get them back on their feet. We'll do what it takes to get a child out of an institution and back with their family. That's our key work. That's what we're about. We're about children at the heart of our organisation."
Andrea continues to tell us about the story that changed the way Forget Me Not where running their charity.
"I'd really like to share a special story about one of the kids that we worked with back in the day when we opened our orphanage. One of the little girls, she was very small, she was four when she arrived. She came to us and after some years, when she was now nine, maybe ten, and she said to me, aunty, please, I want to go home."
"That was news to me because we understood that she was an orphan and had no parents. That's why we were supporting her. But when she looked into my eyes, she told me her truth. That I have a mum and dad. I want to go home. It's like she's saying, I've had enough of the game of the facade of orphanhood. And it was at that point that our team, Mel, myself and our team behind, decided it was time to get to the very bottom of these girls backgrounds.
Today she studies at home far away and she's doing a bachelor's degree. She's thriving with the love and support of her family, no longer needing Forget Me Not to hold that family up. We brought that horrible myth to an end, we realised that she was not an orphan. We busted that wide open with her support and got her back to her family, where she belongs. Look out, Nepal. Because there's young people like Alicia and her sister team, the original children, and Forget Me Not, who mean business.
They want to tell their story, and they want to show that children need families so they thrive in the environment because people like you guys support us to get that reality."
Andrea continues to say,
"The work of Forget Me Not really was born from the heart. There's one thing that we all have in common, globally, every one of us, as humans - we're all children. We all know what it feels like to feel joy, to have freedom, to play, to love, to laugh, to be silly."
"We all have that common denominator. And we realised we were holding children back from that opportunity. We changed. We know that that common fact of being a child together gives people a compassion that they want to share and help. So helping children be their best, helping children move through the hardships of life sometimes takes extra work.
And with the opportunity to be their best, we can go on to help more and more and more and more children do that through education, through wellbeing assessments, through mental health support, to help kids smile again. That's why this campaign means the most to us.
So on that note, we asked Andrea and Mel how the #SMILEFORASMILE campaign and the donations from every smile product sold will make a difference to Forget Me Not.
Mel says, "We are so incredibly grateful to romaroomscolosseum for coming on board, and always being a great supporter. This collaboration in particular is going to make such a difference in the lives of so many people. A little bit goes a long way in the countries that we work in. And we will be able to educate children. We'll be able to reunite children with family. How awesome is that?
We asked Andrea one final question. Can you tell us what would be your ultimate goal for Forget Me Not?
Andrea says, "My ultimate goal for Forget Me Not would be to have our policies really implemented by the government, which is the end of orphanage tourism. So you can no longer go to your country like Nepal and volunteer in an orphanage. Children don't need to be told how to wash hands and clap and dance by people that aren't social workers or from the care industry. They need people who can help them reconnect to their family.
That's what they need. So our ultimate goal is to see that children are reconnected. Ultimately we want them [orphanages] not to exist. We want to see that that problem that we're working to fix is solved and that's going to take a lot of effort. The wave is breaking. You can no longer open an orphanage in Nepal because of some of our background work. The information that children aren't orphans, that they have one or both parents alive, that information is getting cut through. Governments are listening."
When you purchase a smile product, we give smile to the children of Forget Me Not with a cash donation. We are raising funds for our charity partner Forget Me Not Australia, who work with local organisations in Nepal, India and Uganda to reunite trafficked kids with their families and provide support to help keep families together.
Shop the range and be part of the change. Together, we can end #orphanAGE