“They would always say they were coming back, but they never came back.”
These are the words of Sinet Chan in her letter to the Australian government. As a child, Chan spent years in a Cambodian orphanage after losing both of her parents to HIV. Describing her experiences during her formative years there, Chan recounted being forced to entertain the constant stream of visitors from abroad by singing songs and playing games with them in order to encourage donations to the orphanage. “The volunteers were nice people, trying to help us,” Chan wrote, “But now I realise it was a form of exploitation, using us to generate funding.”