“Nicola” is 12 years old. Her family lives on less than US$1 per day. She is the 5th of 8 children. Her home is a small thatched hut with no electricity or water in a remote province bordering Vietnam.
Her family are merely farm labourers toiling for others because they do not have any land of their own. Nicola’s father sometimes goes to Phnom Penh to find work but mostly he stays at home spending what little money the family has on alcohol. He is often abusive.
Most mornings she would walk to school at 6:30am sometimes only to find that there would be n
o class for the day because the teacher was too drunk.
Nicola says, “I found it really hard to think or study because I was always hungry and thinking about food.” Now, at Deborah House she doesn’t have to worry about food. Nicola has put on some weight and her skin has cleared up from the sores that she once had.
“One of the things I like most about Deborah House is that I can go to school everyday. In the province I would have to stay home from school a lot and look after my younger siblings. It’s great that I have a bicycle to ride to school on.”
Nicola now studies in Grade 6 Primary School. Only 47% of Cambodian kids complete the basic 6 years of primary school education. It normally takes them 10 years. Nicola hopes to become a teacher. Our work in Cambodia is based in the capital city of Phnom Penh. We have a boys home called Joshua House and a girls residential project, Deborah House. Joshua House has been running since 2002. There are 15 boys living there with ages spanning from 14 to 25 years old. The average age is around 16 years. Deborah house has 7 girls with an average age of 14 years.
In total there are 5 kids now studying at university.
The ministry in Cambodia is a government registered NGO with clear reporting and accountability to the authorities there. Apart from Donna Byham, our worker who set the work up there, the ministry is completely operated by local indigenous Christian people. The board and house parents are all Khmer people.
As part of our responsibility to ensure that we do what we say we are doing and to make sure too that our work is achieving as per our plans we have recently had an external audit on the quality of our mission in Cambodia. If you would like to look at this audit then email Donna at donnabyham@gmail.com
Written in 2006:
“My name is Sararn. I come from Kandal Province. This is my house. My family are extremely poor. My father and mother are rice farmers. I have 10 siblings of which I am the 4th child.
We had no real chance to study. When I was at home I went to school when I could but I never had enough money to go regularly. Also we did not really have enough food to eat. Some days we ate only rice on its own.
Now that I am living at Joshua House I have enough money to go to school and enough food to eat. Life is much better for me than when I lived in the province. I am very happy about this.”
Sararn is now in his first year at university studying engineering. How cool is that? His family still live in the house above. What a fantastic story about transformation. Education for our Empower Asia kids is our absolute priority.
If our Khmer people had not taken Sararn in to live with them back in 2002 he could never have got out of the poverty trap. It would have been impossible. For that is poverty … the inability to rise above ones current status.
Are you keen to support Sararn and other kids like him? Believe it or not some of our kids are even needier than Sararn!
If you would like to specifically support our Cambodian work then you can directly online donate to our Sure Destiny Operating account at Australia’s Bendigo Bank. Our details are BSB 633-000, Account Number 123876022. Kindly specify which facet of the Cambodian ministry your donation can be used for. If you do not specify then we will direct it to where it is most needed.
