This documentary produced for Channel 4 Television goes undercover to explore the reality behind 'Voluntourism' in Nepal. 'Voluntourism' is defined as "a form of tourism in which travelers participate in voluntary work, typically for a charity." Evan Williams and Unreported World director Laura Warner visit Thamel in Kathmandu, where tourists can volunteer in orphanages. There are more than 500 orphanages in the Kathmandu valley. As well as working as volunteers, every year foreigners donate millions of pounds to help orphans. One former orphanage worker tells Williams about one institution that claims all the 80 children it looks after are orphans or abandoned. But he claims that when he worked there, 45 of the children told him that they had parents. In some cases he has met the parents. He claims that the home's owner is persuading poor, lower-caste families to give up their children with the promise of a good education. The orphanage owner then becomes their legal guardian and attempts to obtain their birth certificates and change their names. Having no birth certificates leaves parents unable to reclaim their children. One mother who gave up her children tells Williams that the orphanage owner refused to give her children back and she alleges that they escaped only after a brutal beating.
Williams meets a former US law enforcer who is investigating this orphanage and others. Alongside testimony from children, she has gathered accounts showing that it receives donations from a range of international donors, including more than £100,000 from one charity alone. Posing as a foreign donor, Laura Warner visits the orphanage with a secret camera. She asks the owner about the two children whose mother the team met, and he tells her they are abandoned children that he rescued from the street. He does not mention the existence of their mother. A manager in another orphanage agrees to talk to Unreported World as long as his identity is kept secret. He claims that government district officials are signing false papers to make children look like orphans when they are not.
Those in the UK can watch the full documentary here.