LWB Community Blog

For the next six weeks during this special holiday season, we’ll be sharing stories about some of the children whose lives have been truly transformed because of this amazing LWB community. First up today is Sampson. It was exactly four years ago that we met this little boy who lives along the border region of Cambodia and Thailand. At just two years of age, Sampson had already lived through more sorrow than any toddler should have to experience.

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.

The city of Poipet, Cambodia is absolutely exploding in growth right now. Since most forms of gambling are illegal in Thailand, the building of casinos just across the border in Cambodia continues nonstop. In addition, a major railway project to connect Bangkok with the capital city of Phnom Penh goes right through this gateway town. Today our medical team visited the large slum area located in the south of the city, where hundreds of children live right along the railroad track.

About a quarter of the world’s population live in slums, officially defined as “squalid and overcrowded districts inhabited by people in poverty.”  In the region we recently visited in Cambodia, that definition was sadly accurate. We passed shanty after shanty built right along the railroad track, metal shacks thrown up by squatters, with dangling electrical lines I was told were illegally and dangerously spliced in. We came to this slum in Cambodia in search of a baby girl whom Leng, our LWB Cambodia Director, first met at a border crossing between Cambodia and Thailand. Leng had been extremely concerned to see how malnourished and sick the little girl was.

LWB has provided family care to thousands of orphaned children since we first launched our foster care program in China over a decade ago. When we decided to begin working with orphaned and vulnerable children in Cambodia, we knew that foster care would once again be an essential part of our work. What we didn’t know at the time was that we would be called upon to help some of the most vulnerable children in that country:  those who had been victims of child trafficking and severe abuse.

As this week’s blog series by LWB Board member Bob Spires explained, Cambodia remains a prime source country for the trafficking of children. Many are taken across the border and live through things no child should ever experience. Read more

This is the third and final blog in our series about human trafficking. As LWB has expanded to Cambodia, we have learned that it is impossible to work there without an understanding of trafficking and how it affects vulnerable children in this region. We are so grateful to our newest board member, Dr. Robert Spires, for sharing his expertise with us.

When I first began to explore the topic of human trafficking, I was overwhelmed. I had a bit of an existential crisis finding out that not only had slavery continued past the 1800s, but it was alive and well. I may have even witnessed it without knowing what I was seeing.

Read more.

As you know, Love Without Boundaries has recently begun working to help vulnerable children in rural Cambodia. Human trafficking, abuse, and child exploitation are issues of grave concern in this area of the world, and so we want to share some thoughts on this issue from our new board member, Dr. Robert Spires.

In Southeast Asia, it is important to clarify who the traffickers really are in this region. That really depends on location and varies greatly. For instance, in Thailand, we see everyone from the Thai and Russian mafia to opportunistic and unscrupulous individuals involved in trafficking. Read more.

Human trafficking, as you might imagine, is a complex topic that crosses many areas of study, including development, economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, criminology and a host of others. For this reason, it is difficult to really call human trafficking a single ‘field of study’. Read more.

All of LWB’s programs are completely run by local citizens in the different countries where we provide services.  This has always been a very important part of our mission philosophy, as we believe the biggest changes in a village or community come through empowering local people who are passionate about making a difference.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sokleng In, the man who is helping hundreds of rural children in Cambodia. Leng, as he likes to be called, set up a small NGO in 2014 to provide primary school education to at-risk children. Within a year, he had over 150 students enrolled. Read more.

Yesterday I wrote about visiting two rural villages on the border between Thailand and Cambodia, and why many children there are unable to attend school. The immense poverty in this region also often prevents children from receiving the medical care they need as well, and today I would like to introduce you to a few of the children and teens I met who need our assistance.

Christine

The first is an absolutely beautiful girl to whom we’ve given the Western name of Christine (because of the issues with trafficking in this region. we will never use any of the children’s real names). Read more.