cambodia We first traveled here in late 2006, exploring both the country and new relationships. What we found was a country that is both full of desperate poverty and teeming with new hope; the past decade has brought a boom in charity and development works.
february 2010
Aiyana, Michelle (our new WhoCares? intern -- yay!) and Carrie (a WhoCares? friend) will be traveling to Cambodia in February! We are so excited to be back with our friends in Poipet.
Here's what we'll do while we're there:
- We'll take some time to visit a new well that was built with money raised by Carrie and her church, First Evengelical Free Church, in Pittsburgh.
- We have some money to give to CHO (our partner organization in Cambodia) for formula to feed the babies at the AIDS hospice. Many thanks to those donors -- you know who you are!
- We are very excited to have Gene and Gretchen Tate of Living Seeds Initiatives (www.livingseedsinitiative.org) meet us for this trip! They specialize in giving agricultural training; CHO has expressed a need for this kind of training for their agricultural self-help groups, so it's a perfect match!
- We will also be touching base with CHO about Imagine Goods, the project we have started in order to comission and sell bags made by women who have micro-businesses (see below for more on that project).
We'll update everyone on our progress by checking in on our blog, so be sure to stay tuned!
june 2009
Aiyana and WhoCares? friend Michelle traveled back to Cambodia in June 2009 with a team of twelve college students! We were so excited to be able to lead a team from Lancaster Bible College on this "exposure trip".
During this ten-day trip, we looked at the justice and poverty issues that people in Cambodia face. We visited beautiful and unique cultural sights as well as the slums and safe havens that are being built to house vulnerable poor.
We asked questions about why there is such a big problem with human trafficking-- What are the root issues at work? What can a concerned person do to change things? How are our lives connected with theirs?
and building another well, (and toilets)!
On this trip, we also were able to see another well that we built! We are so happy to report that we were able to raise all $3000 needed for this well and toilets project! This one was built for a school in the slums that CHO runs.
This school is on the border with Thailand, and the children (as well as everyone else in the slums), go to the bathroom out in the fields, which are known to be littered with land mines. So we're building a well and toilets. What else could we do?
december 2008 - building a well, part 1!
When we visited Poipet during March of 2008, one of the friends who travelled with us was touched by our visit to a village without any water source. The people of Anduong Thmey Meas had dug a small pond, but it was only filled with water during the rainy season. This means that for half the year, the people had to buy water from the water truck (if they could afford it).
So our friend went home, chatted with her husband, and decided that they wanted to give their tax return toward the building of a well! We saw the well on our most recent trip, in December, and even had a chanc to drink some of the clean water!
(A man in her church heard this story and also wanted to give toward a well. He gave $500, which is one-third the cost of a well. We're waiting for another $1000 to build the next well. . . If you are interested, contact us!)
micro-business development
When we travelled to Poipet in March 2008 in order to explore further opportunities of working with CHO, we saw that there was potential for helping some women to develop micro-businesses.
CHO runs a sewing school for teenage girls and young women who need work skills. Many of these girls were trafficked to Thailand; once caught working without papers, they were sent back to Cambodia. Being a border town, Poipet receives many of these trafficked children, who then have neither any way of returning home, nor any means to support themselves.
Once these girls graduate the sewing school, CHO gives them the opportunity to buy a sewing machine through a micro-loan. The problem is that even once they have work sewing, the amount they are able to earn by selling goods to Thai merchants is still not a living wage.
So our idea is to help them to develop products which could sell both here in a western market as well as to tourists in Cambodia. We then would find retailers to sell them here, and they would receive a living wage for their work. Any profits from this joint business venture would then be split between CHO (to go toward further micro-loans), and WhoCares? (to help us become self-sustaining).
Here's a picture of us with the sewing teachers, who would help to manage the project, and some of the bags:
In Poipet, we met a Cambodian man who had spent twenty years in a refugee camp in Thailand. Then, when he was finally able to return home to Cambodia, he established a work called Cambodia Hope Organization (CHO) in order to help trafficked children. He has since expanded his efforts to reach to the root problem of trafficking, extreme poverty; child and adult education, micro-loans, and AIDS education are just a few of CHO's current projects.
imagine if we all did . . .
. . . . . .
liNk
There is more to look at than just the price tag when we think about what we wear - let's check into this!
