The Shay Rebellion | Christopher Shay

“Snakes on a plane is a great concept. I mean you’re on a plane, where you gonna go? If it was snakes on a bus, you could just get off. That happens in Cambodia you know.” —Vanna

As of 2009, I became the Phnom Penh Post’s foreign news editor. I only reluctantly took the position. It’s neat being an editor at a daily paper, and the position looks cool on a business card. But it means fewer journalistic adventures to drug hotspots, tropical islands, or city dumps. It means less writing and photographing.

I’ll be stuck at my desk reading the wires and deciding what people will read (or ignore) the next day. Without any reporters under me, it’s just me making the decisions and a couple of subeditors fixing my screw ups. No more waking up and wracking my brain for a story; no more losing sleep over how to structure an article, and definitely no more hour long lunch breaks.

In college, I procrastinated by reading the news, and—like all college students—I procrastinated a lot.

On the brightside, my new job means that—finally—I won’t have to feel guilty about spending all my time reading the news.

Drug users take a hit as police raids force them into hiding

With a new police chief out to make his name, drug users in Phnom Penh once again live in constant fear of the authorities. I talked to four women for the article who had recently been picked up by the police, beaten and then released. What was most disturbing was not their graphic depictions of police brutality, but their nonchalant way of telling me about it—as if being kicked in the ribs by a policeman was no big deal to them. For them, police violence had become routine.

The women aren’t afraid of being beaten—they’ve gotten used to it—they’re afraid of being taken to a government-run “treatment” center. The police told them that the government was building a new facility, and once it was finished, they taken there and forgotten forever.

A drug user, who was shot in the stomach by the police ten days earlier, smokes yaba.

This is probably just an empty threat from corrupt police, but these women are terrified. They’ve all heard the rumors about of gang rape and detainees being beaten to death.

The police all know where the NGOs that do needle exchange are located, and these women believe that the police try to intentionally patrol those streets.

It should go without saying but this seriously undermines the ability of drug users to seek services, and by forcing them underground, it makes it harder for NGOs to reach out and educate drug users about the dangers of injection drug use.

If the Ministry of Health institutes its pilot methadone maintenance program this summer and these brutal raids continue, no drug user will trust the government, ruining the chances of a humane and effective detox program.

The decision to release the two on bail and return the case to the appeals court for review was a particularly auspicious way to start the new year.—the US Embassy on the temporary release of Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun

Smiling, I stare at my flatmate, rub my eyes and blink slowly a few times.

It’s Friday
No, it Thursday.
It’s Thursday, 2009.

It’s important to establish these things in the morning.

We go to brunch to meet friends, and they don’t show up.
Adam orders well—his breakfast has mangoes and bacon.
I want to drink more coffee, but the place doesn’t have free refills.

The Big Night was a dance floor in a run-down colonial building called The Mansion.

Everybody was there. In Phnom Penh, everybody is everywhere you go.

It rained. We danced. It kept raining, and we kept dancing.

And then we ordered hot dogs.

Not a bad way to end 2008.

In a country where the main river flows backwards for the half the year and which has had two prime ministers at the same time, it shouldn’t surprising that a Christmas holiday that started at a respectable restaurant might end up at a bar surrounded by 26 men in only their tightie-whities.

My Christmas started with escargot and foie gras with stewed fig at a prince’s former house that has since been turned into a French restaurant. A friend from Hong Kong had invited me to a proper Christmas meal with turkey, red wine and good conversation.

From there, I went with my flatmate on a boat cruise on the Tonle Sap. We didn’t really know many people there, but with maybe 35 people on the boat, alcohol and a well-chosen playlist, it was no time before everybody was dancing and generally making merry.

After the boat cruise, a group of us headed out to a Cambodian club to watch and hang out with Cambodian break dancers. As the night progressed, we headed out to another bar, where we heard had a special Christmas show. It turned out to be a male beauty contest of sorts where instead of a swimsuit competition there was an underwear competition. With the contestants walking around in their underwear, I was hit on just enough to feel good about myself but not enough to feel uncomfortable. Gossiping about mutual friends and lamenting the state of the journalism business, my Hong Kong friend and I closed out the bar.

Christmas can be a tough time to be thousands of miles away from family, but this year’s holiday is one I’ll certainly remember and remember fondly.

Coming back from a holiday party replete with home-made egg nog, Christmas cookies and latkas, a friend and I jumped on the back of a moto. It was shortly after midnight and even the dark sides roads were lit up by the full moon at its perigee.

We were almost home when four masked men on two motos drove up beside us. One them grabbed my friend’s purse and pulled us off the moving moto onto the asphalt. Laid out on the ground, three of the men approached—one staying back on lookout. I managed to put my body between my friend and the muggers. Standing over me, one man punched me in the nose, and another hit me in the jaw. They didn’t want me getting in the way of my friend’s purse.

I really wanted to fight back. With that adrenaline rush, I just got angry. They didn’t punch very hard, and they were small, skinny men. I could take them, I thought to myself.

Thankfully before I could make a stupid decision, my friend freed her purse from underneath her body and reached over me to hand it to the men. At which point, they picked up my cell phone which had fallen out of my pocket and leapt back on their scooters, disappearing into the not-so-dark night.

After they’d left, I remembered advice an old Cambodia hand gave me at a bar: There are no fist fights in Cambodia. A well-organized group of thieves like that would surely had knives.

We were a bit shaken but uninjured. My friend had a scrape from the fall, and I escaped without even a bruise to show off to people at the office.

Despite the masks the men wore, you could see their eyes and the wrinkles around them. These were not some young punks , but middle-aged men, and judging by their tactics, this is something they’d done before. For all their efforts, they netted thirty dollars, two borrowed paperbacks, and a cell phone.

The entire mugging took place right next to Toul Sleng, the Khmer Rouge torture facility, a grim reminder of what these men went through in the late 70s.

The term “post-conflict society” get bandied about here a lot, and for good reason. People focus on the KR era that ended in 79, but really fighting didn’t end till the 90s. Not surprisingly, the result of more than four decades of internal strife was a disintegration of public trust and a prevalence of a survivalist attitude where one looks out for one’s self first and foremost. Though this type of robbery could happen anywhere, roving moto bandits are a particularly serious problem in Phnom Penh. Last year, a French tourist was killed when she was pulled off her bike and then hit by an oncoming van.

My friend works for the UN, and they have a weekly security report that lists all the crimes that happened to UN workers. We made the list as an example of what you should in that situation. When I talked to the UN security officer who helped me file a police report, he basically said there was nothing we could’ve done.

These muggings just kind of happen in Cambodia, he explained.

NINE Cambodians were repatriated from Malaysia Thursday, with eight more arriving on Monday. Duped by unscrupulous human traffickers, they were beaten and forced to suffer months, sometimes years, of bonded labour on a Thai fishing vessel before a chance to jump ship presented itself. But the plight of trafficked men like these hardly ever gets a media mention. Why?

“Men don’t make as good TV,” said John McGeoghan of the International Organisation for Migration.
The repatriated men from nine provinces represent only a fraction of the Cambodians who have been lured onto Thai ships illegally, but their horrendous stories – out of sight from the general population – have not received the same limelight as Cambodia’s female flesh trade.

“They are the tip of the iceberg. People are not being told about trafficking onto Thai fishing fleets,” said Manfred Hornung, a monitoring consultant at Licadho.

Chhorn Khaov, 29, a former victim of male trafficking, has a story similar to the men who returned Thursday.
“My family was very poor. A broker told me I could earn a lot of money to support my family [working in Thailand],” he said.
McGeoghan said stories like these are common, and often Cambodian men are able to send money home. But he warned: “Without a contract, the employer has the power, so there is always a risk element.”

Once on the fishing boat, Chhorn Khaov was only given one or two hours of rest a day. The crew drugged him and the rest of the trafficked men to keep them awake and dependent of the boat’s drug supply.

“They forced us to use drugs so we would have the power to work,” he said.

But like the men who returned this week, Chhorn Khaov jumped ship in Malaysia, escaping the harsh conditions on the boat.
The common pattern, according to Hornung, is that men cross over the Thai border on foot at night with the help of a local broker. Once across, a Cambodian on the Thai side picks up the men and drives them to Pak Nam in Samat Prakarn province.

In Pak Nam, they are “locked up in guesthouses – from one day to one week – until they are handed over to a boat captain. Most people, once they’re locked up, they know they’re in trouble,” Hornung said.

Typically, the Thai fishing vessels trawl the South China Sea, according to Hornung, and the boats appear to avoid docking as much as possible.

“We’ve heard that the vessels are approached by bigger ships that take the catch and bring it to port. We’ve had cases of people who never saw land for almost three years,” Hornung said.

But few ships can remain at sea indefinitely. The 17 returning men escaped when their boats docked in Sarawak, Malaysia, at different times from different Thai boats, but all of them – afraid to contact local authorities – ended up on plantations, being exploited as illegal migrants.

A few of the men were able to contact their families in Cambodia, who then contacted Licadho. Working together with the Malaysian NGO Tenaganita, the International Organisation for Migration, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cambodian embassy in Malaysia, they were able to secure their return to Cambodia.

The complex repatriation process took months, but Hornung was pleased with the process and cooperation between the Cambodian and Malaysian governments.

Bith Kimhong, director of the Anti-human Trafficking Department at the Ministry of Interior, said: “Whenever we hear news of trafficking, we always help as quickly as we can. The two countries are cooperating in terms of anti-human trafficking.”

Though reliable statistics on the trafficking of men onto Thai fishing vessels do not exist, anecdotal evidence suggests the problem is serious and growing.

Vichuta Ly, at the Legal Support for Children and Women, said her organisation interviewed 193 migrant returnees from Thailand from 2007 to 2008, and of these people, nearly 40 percent had been trafficked onto Thai fishing vessels.

The National Project Coordinator at the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP), Lim Tith, said he believes the global financial crisis could make Cambodian men more vulnerable to trafficking, as more may be forced to seek employment in Thailand as economic conditions worsen at home.

Terri Ly, executive director at the Healthcare Centre for Children (HCC), which runs one of the few male transit shelters in Cambodia, said the HCC had seven male clients from Thai fishing vessels in the last 10 months of 2007, but in the first 11 months of 2008, that number had jumped to 22 clients.

“Information from the Cambodian border police to HCC is that … the numbers of male Cambodians working in the Thai fishing industry is increasing,” Ly said.

There is no panacea for this situation, according to Hornung, but more information and attention will help.
“Migration is about seeking opportunities. It’s about information. Cambodians need to know about Pak Nam and the Thai fishing fleet. You’re less vulnerable the more information you have,” he said.

Published in the Phnom Penh Post

What was once a colorful sea floor teeming with ocean life had been completely wiped out.

“There was nothing left – just bare sand.” Paul Ferber, a co-founder of Marine Conservation Cambodia, said.

Every time Ferber, a diving instructor at the time, had gone diving at the site about two hours off the coast of Sihanoukville, he would see between 30 and 50 rare seahorses, but on this dive, Ferber counted just two.

“And they were the saddest seahorses I’d ever seen,” Ferber, who has a tattoo of a seahorse on his chest, said. “I just kept touching the sand. I didn’t know what to do.”

A fishing trawler had dragged a weighted net along the bottom of the seafloor, scraping the oceans bare and taking all the marine life with it. Bottom trawling – the marine equivalent to clear-cutting – catches everything in its path, rips out coral reefs and stirs up sediments that can suffocate life on the ocean floor.

Upwards of 90 percent of what ends up in the net is by-catch, unwanted marine sea life that is useless to fishermen but integral to the ocean ecology, according to Greenpeace.
“It can take many years for an ecosystem to recover from something like that,” Ferber said.

Bart Kluskens, a researcher at Marine Conservation Cambodia, called weighted trawling “a waste of nature.”

It was that dive nine months ago that inspired Ferber to take his conservation efforts to the next level and devote himself to saving Cambodia’s marine life. Paul Ferber along with Bora Raan and Bart Kluskens founded Marine Conservation Cambodia, the Kingdom’s only NGO dedicated to conserving Cambodia’s oceans.

And bottom trawling is not the only threat to Cambodia’s sea life. Other types of illegal, damaging fishing techniques that involve cyanide or dynamite are common further off the coast. Kluskens has come across a sunken boat with cyanide containers, and Ferber said he occasionally hears explosions underwater.

As the islands off of Sihanoukville become more popular tourist destinations, a development boom promises to release sediment into the water, potentially suffocating the coral reefs, Kluskens said.

Increased scuba diving also poses a danger. Currently, there are no mooring buoys at the most popular dive spots, meaning boats will often accidentally drop their anchors on the reefs taking a chunk out of the coral.

But despite these threats, Cambodia still has abundant marine life. Gianluca Lamberti, a trainer for Reefcheck, the largest coral reef monitoring program, who is working with Marine Conservation Cambodia, said, “On any dive, you’ll see 10 to 20 seahorses. This is incredible. There’s not a place in the world where a person can see that.”

Seahorses are an important indicator species, because they are particularly sensitive to pollution, Lamberti said. The Cambodian government has recently classified seahorses as endangered, making them illegal to fish, according to Ferber.

In order to combat the problems of illegal bottom trawling, Marine Conservation Cambodia dropped concrete blocks around an area of diverse sea life with the help of the Fishery Administration. If a trawler tries to drag a weighted net in the area, it will get caught in the blocks.

“A ship won’t have to lose many nets to learn not to fish there anymore,” Ferber said.

Marine conservation in Cambodia is in its infancy; no one even really knows what is in oceans yet. No comprehensive survey of Cambodian ocean life has been done, but Marine Conservation Cambodia and Reefcheck hope to change that.

Kluskens agreed, saying “Without research, you don’t know what to conserve.”

With the help of the Samleom community, the organisation is constructing an island office, replete with bathroom, restaurant and bungalows, where it hopes to house scuba divers interested in learning ocean conservation techniques. During the divers’ conservation training, they will be monitoring the coral reefs by counting indicator species, Lamberti said – finally tracking the status of Cambodia’s reefs in a more scientific manner.

The biggest focus of Marine Conservation Cambodia, however, is on land. The group has targeted a community on Koh Rong Samleom, an island right next to ecologically diverse sea grass areas and coral reefs, to educate about marine conservation and to train to protect the area’s oceans.

Again with the help of the Fishery Administration, the Koh Rong Samleom community declared 8,000 hectares of water a community fishing area in September, which means that people outside of the community are not allowed to fish within that designated area without permission. Village members patrol the ocean and regularly expel illegal fishing boats. They already intercepted a boat that had caught about 140 endangered seahorses.

Lay Thai, the chief of Koh Rong Samleom village, said, “When the community fishing area started, we were really happy. Before, we were not allowed to send boats away. With more fish, we’ll have more happy tourists.”

Starting next week, Marine Conservation Cambodia hopes to train community members to be scuba divers so they can see for themselves what is bringing tourists to their island and what they are trying to conserve.

The village chief has been hoping to go diving for months and will finally get the opportunity next week when equipment arrives from Thailand. “I want to go diving and see the coral,” Lay Thai told Bora Raan for the umpteenth time.

Caroline St-Denis, who heads an education project at Marine Conservation Cambodia, said, “The best way to explain why marine conservation is important is to say come down with us. They can see things they had no idea was there … They will understand that learning to protect the coral will keep people coming,”

Beyond showing government officials what is under the sea, Marine Conservation Cambodia sees children’s education as a key part of their mission.

“The children do most of the fishing. If we teach them now to fish, they’ll pass it on to the next generation,” Ferber said.

Bora Raan, who is the only Khmer diving instruction, said “I learned and got my [diving] certifications, and I want them to do the same. I want them to maybe have a career in the future … I really want all the kids to know how to take care of the ocean.”

Through its involvement in the community, the group has also helped build a path to school so the children do not have to wade through a swamp, taught classes and donated books.

“It’s not so much marine conservation. It’s just needed … Even though our name is Marine Conservation Cambodia, it’s about the village. If they’re not struggling, they’ll be able help,” Ferber said.

To help the village, Marine Conservation Cambodia and the island community will stick long bamboo poles with leaves coming out of them into the seafloor, effectively creating a fish farm that allows fish to lay their eggs and take refuge in the leaves. It’s another technique that prevents bottom trawling, but Ferber and the Lay Thai hope it will also allow for sustainable fishing.

“If we can make it work the fish farm work here, then we can take it to other places in Cambodia,” Ferber said.

With a fever, an upset stomach and a splitting headache, Chheth Sokha, 52, did what she always did when she felt sick — she went to the grocery store and bought some cheap medicine.

“Whenever I am sick, I always buy medicine at grocery stores, because it is cheaper than at big pharmacies,” she said.

She bought the same medicine she had purchased the last time she was sick, but this time instead of making her feel better, the medicine landed her at the Russian Hospital.

“The doctor told me that I was poisoned by the medicine. I thought by buying cheap medicines I could save money, but it was the opposite. Fake medicine cost me even more when I got worse and had to go to the hospital,” she said.

The medicine that Chheth Sokha bought was almost certainly counterfeit. The problem of fake medicine in Cambodia is a long-standing one, and despite efforts from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Interpol and the Cambodian government, it is not a problem that is easily cured.

A week ago, Interpol seized US$6.65 million of counterfeit drugs in Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, but even this impressive haul will not significantly impact the global counterfeit drug market, experts say.

“It is a huge illegal business, and single events in and of themselves will be unlikely to make a dent in the world market of counterfeit drugs,” Thomas Kubic, the president of US-based Pharmaceutical Security Institute, said.

Kubic pointed to a recent seizure in Belgium to illustrate the scope of the global problem. In September, over 2,146,000 counterfeit anti-malaria and pain medications from India en route to Togo were seized. Inquiries disclosed that this was just one of four other similar weighted shipments — with an estimated total of over 10,000,000 dosages.”

Specific statistics for Cambodia are unavailable, but a 2007 WHO estimate revealed that about 200,000 people in Asia die every year as a direct result of counterfeit pharmaceuticals.

With porous borders, an impoverished population and a drug distribution system that still relies on over a thousand unregistered pharmacies, Cambodia is particularly vulnerable to counterfeits streaming in from other countries, but increased efforts by international organisations and the government have made a noticeable impact in recent years.

A Cambodian Health Ministry survey conducted in 2002 revealed that about 13 percent of drugs in the Kingdom were counterfeit, and now estimates put the percentage at around ten percent. In contrast, only about one percent of drugs in developed countries are counterfeit.

“The prevalence of counterfeit drugs has decreased. We have done a lot of education to people about counterfeited items, and the items have started to disappear in the markets,” Chroeng Sokhan, the vice director of the department of drug and food said.

But Chroeng Sokhan admitted that due to the global nature of the problem, there is only so much that can be done locally.

“Counterfeiters have a lot of money, so they can do many things. They can adapt. It’s a difficult problem to solve locally. We need Interpol support for cross-border help,” he said.

The government says it is working with its neighbours to decrease the number of fake drugs smuggled across borders of southeast Asia.

“We are taking measures to crackdown on the illegal trafficking of fake medicine. This is being done with the cooperation of authorities in neighbouring countries by increasing the exchange of information,” Sar Kheng, the deputy prime minister, said in a meeting last week.

“Even though China, Thailand and Laos refuse to admit some of their citizens produce fake drugs, what is important is that we cooperate to strengthen the border checks,” Yim Yann said.

The other key part of Cambodia’s war against counterfeits is to educate Cambodians about the dangers of fake pharmaceuticals. The government as well as drug producers have focused on educating pharmacists, hoping to create a frontline against the distribution of counterfeits in the Kingdom.

Has Aun, a pharmacist who sells medicine near Central Market, said, “It is difficult for us to know whether a drug is fake or good because they really look the same. But we have been trained on how to detect fake drugs by the drug producers and the Ministry of Health.”

Sok Serey, another pharmacist said, “The ministry’s agents examine our pharmacy at least two or three times a year. They train us how to check for expired drugs and how to check the brand names of drugs.”

The sophistication of some of the counterfeit drugs have made it nearly impossibly to tell if a drug is authentic or not. For the last five years, counterfeit malaria medicine with holograms nearly indistinguishable from the real drug have been found in the Kingdom, according to a report authored by sixteen top malaria researchers.

Tey Sovannarith, the deputy director of the technology office in the drug quality experimentation and examination department, said that when a visual inspection is inconclusive, he even needs to resort to checking the melting time of the pills in order to know for sure if a drug is counterfeit.

The counterfeit drug market has hurt the reputation of overseas drug companies in Cambodia, especially ones from China. Sok Serey said that her pharmacy did not carry any medicine made in China, because of the danger of counterfeits.

“I don’t like Chinese medicine. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t,” she said.

Chroeng Sokhan mentioned that two of the three counterfeit drug “ghost manufacturers” — fake companies that produce fake drugs — that currently produce the majority of the counterfeits in Cambodia are located in China.

What can Cambodian consumers do? According to William Mfuko, the officer responsible for essential medicines at WHO in Cambodia, because of public education efforts, all Cambodians need to is “watch TV, listen to their radio and look out for posters that warn against counterfeit drugs.”

“Most of all,” he said, “they should develop habits of consulting medical professionals for their drug needs. Self-medication is often the driving force behind counterfeit drug markets.”

Through continued education and better enforcement, the government hopes that Cambodians will become more discerning drug consumers and will learn what Chheth Sokha had to figure out the hard way.

“From now on, I’ll remember the doctor’s advice not to use medicines which do not have clear or proper brand names. Moreover, I will be really careful taking medicine, because they are double-edged swords. They are good for us only if we use them properly. But if we do not use them properly, they could kill us,” she said.

Also written by Khoun Leahkana

Early this month World Expedition, a global adventure travel company, charged tourists AUS$1,790 (US$ 1,159) for a twelve-day tour of Cambodia, selling their tour product as a “community project,” because four of the twelve days were spent repairing a schoolhouse in Siem Reap.

Is four days work from unskilled laborers an expensive guilt trip for tourists and an onus on the local community, or can it make a real, lasting impact on both the participants and the community?

More travelers than ever are including volunteer work on their vacation itineraries, but when the volunteer tourist sector merges with for-profit tourism, critics warn that do-gooders can be duped into doing more harm than good.

Tourism where one blends vacation time with charity work, dubbed voluntourism, has boomed in the last two years.

According to a poll from Travelocity, a popular travel website, the number of travelers planning to volunteer during their vacation jumped from six percent in 2006 to eleven percent in 2007, and a 2008 survey sponsored by msnbc.com and Condé Nast suggests even faster growth this year with more than 55 percent of people expressing interest in taking a volunteer vacation.

David Clemmons, founder of US-based voluntourism.org, said, “The number of participants, as measured by at least 15 Voluntourism operators… is significantly higher than [in] 2007. Some organizations are experiencing more than 100% growth.”

Volunteer tourism is nothing new, but traditionally, the sector was run mainly by church groups and NGOs. Today as interest in voluntourism grows, large, for-profit, travel companies are getting into mix, and they have a different priority — the bottom line.

There is nothing inherently wrong with commercial organisations sending volunteers, but the needs and interests of local communities should still be a concern, Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer of UK-based tourism watchdog Tourism Concern, said.

“It’s vital that the projects are not determined by market demand and provide meaningful long-term benefits to local people. Fulfilling the ‘feel good’ factor for tourists should not be done at the expense of the developmental needs of local communities,” Noble said.

Daniela Papi, the president of Siem Reap-based PEPY Tours, a for-profit tour company designed to fund a separate PEPY nonprofit organisation, is critical of many of the voluntourism opportunities available in Cambodia. She stresses the need of volunteer tour operators to be involved in long-term projects in order to know the effect of the volunteering on the community.

“Short-term volunteering is very hard to translate into positive impact… You can’t monitor the impact on the community if you only visit it three times a year,” she said.

Papi criticised companies like World Expeditions that do not give money to the community or insist that its customers do.

“There are very few situations where unskilled volunteers should come without funding to a project — especially if you’re coming just for two hours. You’re probably just taking the director’s time… Volunteers aren’t free,” Papi said. “If the companies are making money, they should give back.”

PEPY tours integrates their product with their non-profit organisation’s long-term work and requires their tourists to bring in funding, Papi said, but she admits that her organisation is not perfect and stresses that volunteer tourism is a delicate balance that requires constant self-reflection.

“You have to admit you’re going to make mistakes. You have to be willing to change. Too often, people are afraid to do that,” Papi said. “I trust organisations the will admit to the mistakes they’ve made.”

One thing all voluntourism experts agree on is that people interested in volunteering while traveling need to be discerning.

“Travelers need to start demanding that it’s done responsibly. They need to call out tour operators,” Papi said.

There are a few things that customers should look for in a volunteer vacation to ensure that their trip both helpful and fun.

First, Noble at Tourism Concern emphasized that volunteer work should take advantage of the particular skills of the tourists, language skills for instance, so that they are not taking jobs away from locals.

“It’s important that projects don’t take on volunteers to do work that could be done perfectly competently by and provide employment for local people. Our research has shown that volunteers are only too aware when their well-intended efforts are not providing any real benefit to local people, leading to unhappy locals and unhappy volunteers,” she said.

Second, be wary of volunteer tours that advertise a long time ahead of the project and are inflexible about the charitywork they will doing, Papi said. These types of volunteer tours create an incentive not to fix the problem locally, because they know tourists will come in — with additional money — to solve the problem for them.

“When you’re advertising a volunteer tour six months out, there’s a problem. What if you realize the program is corrupt or the needs are elsewhere?” Papi said.

Most importantly, a tourist interested in doing some volunteering should be sure to ask the operator some basic questions about the projects, especially about where the money is going.

Tourism Concern recommends that a person, “enquire about how they [tour operators] work with local communities, whether it’s a long-term partnership, whether they contribute money directly in support of the project and how the project is appraised.”

Despite the dangers of volunteer tours using communities as marketing ploys, Clemmons believes carefully planned voluntourism has the potential to change the very nature of travel by making people engage with local communities and think about where their money is going.

“Voluntourism may… introduce us to unprecedented forms of social entrepreneurism, change travel from a leisure activity to a lifestyle and life-purpose engagement, and shake the roots of capitalism by making it conscious and intentional,” he said.