Poverty, Tourism and its Consequences

Cambodia is war and terror-torn, with a lack of education, worker-skills and infrastructure and poverty all over the country. The Khmer Rouge regime killed almost all of their own intellectual people, and destroyed schools and infrastructure - so there is the need to build houses but there is no one left who is able because there is a lack of engineers and architects. This is only one example.
Begging is a big problem in Cambodia, and unfortunately begging or selling little things to tourists brings in more money than going to school to get an education. So there are lots of children begging you to buy things, and they are really good in making you feel bad when not buying anything. So far we could resist, and only bought some postcards from one little girl in the temples, because we know we don't help them in the long-term by buying things from them.
Since Cambodia has a long and tragic history of killing, more than half of the population is below 27 years of age. On the street you can see a lot of homeless (?) women with kids begging for money, and at the museum of the genocide there are victims of war with burned faces or lost legs coming up to you begging for money. So they give you a hard and exhausting time here, and learning about the country makes you feel bad and appreciate what you have at the same time.
There are lot of organizations and projects offering long term help and support services that help kids and people in need to have a better future. For example cooking schools where restaurants train street kids for free to give them a qualification, or a kids hospital run by donations and volunteer work or renting bikes with all profit for building houses, projects for producing prosthetics for mine-injured people, non-profit organizations for orphans, etc.
You are advised not to give money directly to children or street sales people, but rather to a charity project as an effective alternative. They produce clearly labelled products for a slightly higher price, but they ensure safe and humane working conditions and are made by parents, so that children can go back to school, or by disabled people and former street kids in training so that they can find employment.