The downside of charity

I blame Charles Dickens, personally: he of David Copperfield, Little Nell, Oliver Twist and, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s the father of what you might call the orphan-industrial complex, which is to say, the discovery that there is a fantastic amount of money to be made out of the sentimental feelings aroused in the well-heeled and tender-hearted by waifs in general and orphans in particular. It has taken more than a century for the orphan-industrial complex to reach its final form, but I think we’re there. 

A report in yesterday’s Sunday Times described the experiences of a young Nepali girl called Rijya, who grew up in a privately run orphanage in Kathmandu. Rijya’s papers said that she had no parents, and the staff at the home assured her of the same thing. But the penny started to drop when she noticed adults showing up at the gates of the orphanage demanding to see their children.