Thanks to our wonderful supporters, LWB has been able to deliver over 500,000 pounds of emergency food supplies to children and their families during COVID. As we’ve headed out into new locations, we’ve met some truly remarkable people along the way. Today, I want to introduce you to a very special family from rural Cambodia.
Earlier this year, as we began COVID emergency food distributions along the Cambodian border with Thailand, we met a young widow named Elva. Her husband had been killed just a few weeks before as he stepped on a land mine while trying to cross the border to find food for his family. Elva was left with 8 small children in her care, including Baby Jennifer. With no income and no home of their own, our team found them living in a temporary tent shelter, exposed to the elements. Wrapped in a red piece of cloth, Baby Jennifer was clearly in need of urgent nutritional support.
We recently discussed the situation of orphanages in western Odisha, India with YCDA, our partner for foster care there. They informed us that there are 16 orphanages which are registered by the government but receive no government support. Normally, these orphanages rely on local donations for the children, but with the rapid spread of COVID in the region, most local donations have come to a halt. This region is already severely impoverished, so the 533 children living in these orphanages are in great need of emergency food relief.
When LWB first began working in rural Sokhem Village, Cambodia in 2016, over 80% of the children there suffered from chronic malnutrition. Since that time, we’ve implemented an ongoing nutrition project to ensure that every child in the village who needs additional support can receive a healthy breakfast and lunch through our Believe in Me school program.
Born in the late fall of 2014 in northern Anhui, Benjamin soon joined our Heartbridge Healing Home for extra love and care to prepare for cleft surgery. He was a beautiful baby with the crabbiest set of eyebrows, and LWB volunteers loved to see new pictures of “Grumpy Benjamin” in our email inboxes each week.
Meet Tegan, a darling four-year-old from our Rangsei Believe In Me school who is in need of additional sponsors. Tegan attends school with her sister and brother and also has a baby brother who stays home with her mom. During our team’s recent visit to their region of rural Cambodia, we were able to chat with Tegan’s mom. She shared with us more about the daily hardships her family faces as well as their determination to keep their children in school.
Love Without Boundaries is honored to be one of the only charities in western Cambodia providing foster care to children. We currently have two foster care programs in place: Safe Haven foster care for children who have been trafficked or severely abused, and traditional foster care for children who have become orphaned or abandoned. Our traditional foster care program has recently added five additional children to our care.
Over 40% of children in Cambodia suffer chronic malnutrition so serious that stunting and health issues are common. In many cases, the children’s naturally dark hair will turn blonde due to lack of good nutrition in a condition called Kwashiorkor malnutrition. We’re working to change that number through our hot lunch program in our Believe in Me schools. Every day, cooks at our Believe In Me hot lunch program work hard to produce a nutritious meal for the 180 children who attend the school. The kitchen facilities they use are very basic, and electricity is unavailable.
Back in 2004, the government of China launched an unprecedented medical project known as the Tomorrow Plan. This ambitious program would help provide surgeries to thousands of orphaned children with medical needs. Love Without Boundaries was honored to become the first foreign charity to provide funding for the Tomorrow Plan, and we helped arrange the first eight heart surgeries ever done under the program. We chose four children from the Haikou orphanage on Hainan Island and four children from the Shantou orphanage in Guangdong province. The tiniest baby to receive heart surgery was a baby who came to be known as Little Monkey.
Just over a year ago, LWB-Cambodia began working in remote Sokhem Village, near the border with Thailand. The rural communities of western Cambodia continue to face significant challenges decades after the tragic genocide by the Khmer Rouge. Extreme poverty is rampant, and human trafficking remains a critical issue. The families in Sokhem Village struggle to […]
