YANGON, BURMA (3/10)
Bracing herself for an exciting life
In the month of May 2010 we will have six girls move into a new girls’ house in Yangon, Burma. We have a 37 year-old single woman who is ready and capable to lead the work. She is already well known to our board members. They have great confidence in her. She has two Masters degrees (which is two more than most of us!). We will rent a house and the girls will commence school in June.
We expect the monthly budget to be NZ$950 (US$650) . And yes you guessed it! We have no money for the project. Nothing! But that doesn’t put us off does it? The best way to solve this is to find ten people/families/groups who will support NZ$100/month each. Easy.
The six girls that we choose will have the following backgrounds:
- from the Burman majority people group,
- well behaved but at-risk to prostitution/trafficking/slave labour,
- orphaned or from a solo parent home,
- impoverished and aged around 9-13 years,
- clever but with no opportunity to study any further.
To put it plainly, we want very poor girls with high potential.
UPDATE: We have raised NZ$150/month so just another $850/month to go. So email us if you want to support.
POKHARA, NEPAL (2/10)
Yam, Laxami and Mum
Yam (21) is one of our old boys from Kathmandu. He lived with us for 5 years or more. He decided not to go to university but instead managed to successfully join the Gurkha Regiment in Singapore. For a Nepali boy this is an esteemed occupation. Yam is back in Nepal for 6 months on holiday break staying with his parents. Laxami is one of our girls who lives in our home in Pokhara. Shortly she will finish high school and Yam will put her through university.
About 25,000 boys apply for the Gurkha’s each year and following academic, fitness and medical tests just 350 are selected. For all of you fitness buffs out there, Yam had to run 2.4km in less than 9 minutes 15 seconds, run 5.5km up a hill with 25kg webbing on in less than 50 minutes, do 75 sit-ups in less than 2 minutes and do a minimum of 15 pull ups.
Yam is a very nice, mannered and confident young man who did a great job of being my tour guide recently when I went to Pokhara! Long term he will probably be a good supporter of our work in Nepal.
YANGON, BURMA (2/10)
Termites, saggy bearers and split piles. Hmmmm might be time for a new concrete base and floor.
Currently 18 boys live in our house in Yangon. We are going to fix it up and then expand our house. We will need to pour a concrete floor, brick the whole of the outside walls of the first floor, use new wooden weatherboarding on the external walls of the second floor. In addition we will add on another 30 sq.m of room both down stairs and upstairs.
When the job is finished we will initially take in about 6 new boys. Then in the following year we will take another 4 boys.
The house will extend out 5 metres both up and downstairs. Brick exterior walls down and wooden weatherboards up.
Our house father is very good at raising kids to go out and serve their communities so it is good that we have more room to take in more boys.
We need to raise another US$2400 (NZ$$3000) to complete all of the fund raising. Hopefully we will start fixing up and extending the house by early April 2010.
SHAN STATE, BURMA (2/10) Our girls work is located in an area known
as The Golden Triangle. We have 8 kids being nurtured and cared for full-time. They are aged 13- 18 years. The home has been operating for 3 years. Having just visited there, I came away staggered at the backgrounds of our girls. I simply did not know that our Shan girls were so at-risk. This area of the Golden Triangle is a bit like the wild-west.
Life is cheap. The combination of drugs (worth in the billions of dollars), the sale of children into prostitution, violence, kidnapping, rape, press ganging of it’s citizens into the army, drug lords and an oppressive marauding government army all work together to make these kids the most at-risk of any Empower Asia kids that we care for.
Currently we have eight girls living in our home in the Shan State. This is a piddling amount when we look at the size of the problem. Empower Asia is more concerned about quality than quantity however caring for just 8 kids is too small an amount especially when we can gain access to so many other highly endangered kids. Why shouldn’t we house 28 kids or more?
So we are going to buy a piece of land and build a home. At this time we are renting a house which is dramatically restricting our growth. Plus the rent always seems to be going up. In the medium term it makes good financial sense to purchase a good sized block of land and build.
Because the price of land is doubling every 12-18 months we can subdivide
off a piece of our land block and sell it at a later date. This sale price will likely be about equal to the price that we originally paid for the whole block of land in the first place.
We sense that it is time to move the ministry on to the next level. To do this we need to have our own premises where we will have the freedom to take in many more kids. We don’t have a staff/personal problem, but rather, we have a living space problem.
And what is really cool is that one of our older girls is likely to soon go off to Bible college for 2 or 3 years and then come back and work at the house as a big sister to the younger ones.
We want to raise USD$20,000 to purchase a rectangular shaped piece of land with the dimensions of 30m by 43m (100 feet by 140 feet). The land has an area of 1290m2.
Hence 1m2 has a cost of US$15.50 (NZ$20)
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
- Would you like to buy 10m2 of land or 50m2 or 100m2? Just tell us how much you want. Or would you like to make a USD$1000, USD$5000 or USD$10,000 donation?
- Would it be useful for me to meet your friends/group/church/business partners? I am happy to do so. Would you advocate on our behalf to your friends and workmates?
Are you interested to run a fund raising event? We can help resource you. - Simply email us at empowerasia@gmail.com
CAMBODIA (4/09)
Update from Sararn. (Note that we have not edited his letter below. It is 
easy for you to see how much progress he has made in his English language skills).
“My studies have been more difficult than normal as we have been studying as new subjects, this semester I have started study skill of engineer. I am enjoying it but it is hard to understand and remember everything as the lecturer teaches in English and there are many words I don’t understand.
This month I have been pending a lot of time in the library preparing assignments that are due. We have a lot of assignments to hand in this month. The three assignments are on Aotu-Cad , strength material and geology.
Even though I’ve been busy doing my assignments I went to the river front with my brothers from Joshua House we walked by the river and also played soccer there.
In March it is hot 10AM to 4PM there are many small trees along the road died. It has never rained several months”.
If you want to see Saran’s story then click to http://empower.asia/cambodia/
THAILAND (3/09)
Anne (18) will graduate high school next month. She must be one of the nicest people that Carlie and I know. At present Anne is sitting exams to either gain entry into either a food technology course or a nursing degree at university. She would be a great nurse.
Her heart language is a Cambodian dialect, but she also speaks Thai, Lao and some English. Anne has been with us for more than six years. She is a lovely girl, very good natured and fun to be around. Anne and her best buddy, Mon are our two head girls at Esther House, Thailand.
Our house mum will miss her a lot because apart from Anne being such a nice person she also has a kind and friendly nature that she uses to effectively lead the other 20 girls at the home.
Anne likes her food and especially if it is hot. We have told her that she is going to have to cool down a bit on the chilli consumption however because on several occasions we have had to take her to hospital for medical attention because of stomach pains.
We are hoping to raise finance to help Anne so that she can stay in a safe hostel when she attends university later this year.
THAILAND (2/09)
Mon (18) is great mates with Anne (see the story above). She speaks Cambodian, Thai, Lao and some English. Mon, pictured right, is a bright and capable girl who always has good ideas. She is a problem solver. She has a warm and bright personality and is a very hard worker. Sometimes we hear her in the kitchen at 4:30AM capably preparing breakfast for the fifty of us.
Mon came to live with us six years ago and has done just great.
She is sitting entrance exams for university and is trying to gain entry into health or nursing studies.
