LWB Community Blog

At the beginning of our year-end campaign, we introduced you to 10-year-old Rena. When we first met her back in September, she’d been left in charge of her three little brothers while her mom went searching for work. They’d been sleeping along the Cambodian border on public land after fleeing to escape domestic violence. She told our team that their meager food supplies were now gone, so she’d been taking water from the dirty creek to feed her baby brother. She hoped the water would fill his stomach enough to make his cries of hunger stop.

In countries all over the world, people live and work at local landfills, picking through mounds of rotten waste and broken glass to search for recyclables. It’s grueling work, yet each day the families comb through the garbage, gathering plastic they can exchange for a small amount of cash. It was at a landfill in western Cambodia that we first met little Perry.

We’ve been counting the days until we could share some very exciting news. Our Sokhem Sibling School has evolved and will now be known as the Sokhem Early Childhood Development Center. Initially, our Sibling School was founded to face a critical need in rural Sokhem village. We learned that most of the adults in the village crossed into Thailand each day searching for work, leaving their children behind and on their own for long periods of time. Many of the children ages 6 and up were unable to attend primary school because they had to serve as full-time caregivers each day for their little sisters and brothers.