A little background first... when the property at Happy Home was being developed a few years ago, fill-dirt was brought-in to build-up the ground level of the property by more than a meter. The fill-dirt was really more like ‘fill-rocks’ with a little dirt mixed in. So when we first began our valiant effort of digging the tree holes by hand, it took two people more than two hours to dig a single hole a half-meter deep and half-meter wide because there were so many boulders in the ground. So, we quickly ditched that idea and decided to hire a backhoe to dig the holes for us. The backhoe was certainly faster, but it left us with 50 massive coffin-sized holes for the trees along the wall. Then the work began!
Step 1: Separate the rocks from the fill-dirt and haul them away to our new gigantic rock-pile. Rake fill-dirt back into holes.
Step 2: Fill the holes with good black dirt we bought by the truckload and chop it up.
Step 3: Mix-in a bag of cow manure with the black dirt and chop again.
Step 4: Finally, plant 50 trees along the wall! What a glorious day!
As if we hadn’t learned our lesson, we then decided to go ahead and plant 15 fruit trees in the yard also! aka: Rehire the backhoe, repeat Steps 1-5, again! Oiy!
The staff and kids did an awesome job! Everyone pitched in, from the littlest to the biggest. We worked every morning, evening, and weekend until it was all done! And we finished in the nick of time! Rainy season has started and the Lord is watering all our new little trees perfectly! As consuming and exhausting as it was, there is something very therapeutic and rewarding about working with the land and with your hands. I wonder if that’s why the Lord put Adam in the Garden, instead of in an office? Hhmmm……
In the midst of all the work, we did make time for some fun to keep up everyone’s spirits. On June 1st, we joined many other NGOs and schools in a parade through Poipet in celebration of International Children’s Day……..
….and followed that with some games at home for the kids.
A small (very small) carnival came to town for a few weeks, so we took the kids to play the games and ride the rides (aka ‘deathtraps’). (Boy, if you think carnival rides in the States are scary, you should see them in Cambodia.)
And finally, one day when the big kids were away at youth group, we had a special “Little Kids Only” day, which included games, bubbles, treats and movie time. They loved it!
Well, that’s about it for Happy Home news. Oh, one more thing, we will be adding three new little boys to our Happy Home family in the next couple of weeks! I’ll tell you more about them next time. :-)
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I usually like to keep these updates light and cheerful, because that’s what our lives at Happy Home are generally like. Everyone who visits our home says the same thing, “It’s so peaceful here” or “This is a sanctuary”. And it truly is, because of the Lord’s blessings and presence here with us. But outside of our sanctuary, Cambodia can be a pretty dark and despairing place. I want to tell you about a few situations we’ve encountered recently to give you a glimpse of what life in Cambodia can be like for the majority of the people here. There are no pictures for this section.• A couple of months ago, a 22 year-old woman came by the home asking for our help. She had moved to Poipet from a village in northern Cambodia about a year ago with her four younger siblings. Her father had abandoned the family, and her mother was unable to work to care for the children, so she became the breadwinner. And now, she was unable to find work locally to continue supporting her siblings. She asked if we could take her brothers and sisters to live at Happy Home, and she planned to go work overseas in Malaysia. Immediately, alarms started going off in my mind. It sounded to me like she was walking right into the hands of human traffickers.
This is a classic situation. Traffickers target young, desperate, uneducated women and promise them good pay, education, and the opportunity to help their families. But in reality, they are forced into slave labor, or worse. In this case, the company had told the girl they would take her to Phnom Penh for three months of English language studies and get a passport for her before going to Malaysia to work in a hotel. But in exchange, she would have to give them her first six months’ salary to pay for the classes and the passport. Most likely, and unbeknownst to her, that cycle would then continue. The company would say she owed them for her airfare to Malaysia, her room and board, uniforms, etc. So she would be perpetually broke and indebted to the company, unable to help her family, and unable to return to Cambodia even if she wanted. (The company usually keeps that passport from the person for “safekeeping”.) So at the end of her three-year contract, she would have provided three years of slave labor and have absolutely nothing to show for it, returning home to her family shame-faced and in a worse situation than when she left.
After talking with her, we contacted some other NGOs in town that work with these situations. They met with her, talked at length with her, and presented her with other education and work options. In the end, she decided not to go to Malaysia, and another children’s home received her siblings. I sometimes see her riding through town on her bike now, and feel a deep gratitude that we were able to help her and her family. I received an e-mail last week from an anti-trafficking organization in Phnom Penh saying the police have cracked down and are beginning to prosecute labor companies sending girls to Malaysia. Praise God!
• The next week, a 15 year-old girl walked into Happy Home with her suitcase in hand and kept saying “I want to live here. I want to live here.” The girl was uneducated and seemed perhaps a bit mentally slow. When we calmed her down, we were able to piece together her story. Her mother had “married her off” to a 28 year-old man about three months prior. (Essentially the mother gave her to this man because they were too poor for a wedding.) The husband was an alcoholic and abusive, and had kicked the girl out of their home that morning and told her not to come back. The girl made her way to Poipet looking for her parents who had moved here recently, but she didn’t know where they lived. Since she couldn’t find them, she asked people where she could go to stay, and she ended up at our home. We contacted a women’s crisis center in town and they were able to take her in that same night. I’m sorry to say I don’t know what became of this girl, but the shelter does good work and I feel confident they were able to help her.
• A couple of weeks later, while I was in Bangkok, I received a call from one of my staff saying that the mother of one of our girls was in the hospital about to die. The family asked if we could please bring the girl to see her mother before she died. Witt and Mom took the girl the same night, and her mom died a few hours later. It turns out, her mother had been badly beaten by her abusive boyfriend a few days before but had not been able to go to the doctor. She laid at home getting worse and worse until her family found her and took her to the hospital, at which point it was too late. I remember seeing this lady just a few weeks before and she told us she was leaving her boyfriend and moving away. It seems she waited too long. Now her daughter is truly an orphan. Thank the Lord she is with us.
• About that same time, another mother of two of our kids became very sick with AIDS because she had stopped taking her ARV medications about six months prior. She has been in the AIDS clinic for five weeks now and is only getting worse. In hospitals and clinics in Cambodia, the patient is usually required to have someone come stay with them because the staff and doctors do nothing for the patients other than hand out meds and start IVs. This lady has no family other than her kids and no close friends, so we are stopping in to care for her three times every day. I was able to get her ARV meds restarted last week, but they are making her so nauseated she can’t even drink water without vomiting. She is becoming very gaunt and emaciated, and at this point she can do almost nothing without assistance because she is so weak. It is a very heartbreaking, discouraging situation. We are helpless to do more for her but to pray for God’s mercy and grace upon her. Please pray with us.
When we encounter situations like these, it makes me even more grateful to the Lord for our home, our sanctuary of peace in the midst of so much darkness in this country. And I am especially thankful to the Lord for bringing the children to live at Happy Home, for giving them a chance at a new life, a different way of living. In Cambodia, it seems there is such a stark contrast between living life with God and living life without God. Without Him, there truly is no hope. May we cling to Him, as we consider how different our own lives may have been without Him. Bless the Lord!
"I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you,
that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing;
therefore CHOOSE LIFE, that both you and your descendants may live;
that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice,
and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days;….. "
Deuteronomy 30:19-20a
