EMPOWER ASIA CAMBODIA has two discipleship homes both based in Phnom Penh.

Homes:

Joshua House
Number of Kids - 15 boys
Commenced - 2002
Average Age - 17 years

Deborah House
Number of Kids - 10 girls
Commenced - 2007
Average Age - 15 years

Cambodia:
Population of 13 million.
Religious makeup: 95% Buddhist, 3% Muslim and 2% Christian
Only 47% of Cambodian kids complete the basic 6 years of primary school education. It normally takes them 10 years.

“Nicola” is 13 years old and studies in grade 7. Her family lives on less than US$1 per day. She is the 5th of 8 children. Her home is a small thatched hut with no electricity or water in a remote province bordering Vietnam. Her family are landless farm laborers toiling for others. Nicola’s father sometimes goes to Phnom Penh to find work but mostly he stays at home spending what little money the family has on alcohol. He is often abusive. Most mornings she would walk to school at 6:30am sometimes only to find that there would be no class for the day because the teacher was too drunk.
Nicola says, “I found it really hard to think or study because I was always hungry and thinking about food.” Now, at Deborah House she doesn’t have to worry about food. Nicola has put on some weight and her skin has cleared up from the sores that she once had. “One of the things I like most about Deborah House is that I can go to school everyday. In the province I would have to stay home from school a lot and look after my younger siblings. It’s great that I have a bicycle to ride to school on.” Nicola hopes to become a teacher.

My name is Sararn. My family is extremely poor. My father and mother are rice farmers. I have 10 siblings of which I am the 4th child. We had no real chance to study. When I was at home I went to school when I could but I never had enough money to go regularly. Also we did not really have enough food to eat. Some days we ate only rice on its own.

Now that I am living at Joshua House I have enough money to go to school and enough food to eat. Life is much better for me than when I lived in the province. I am very happy about this”. Sararn is now in his second year at university studying engineering. What a fantastic story about transformation. Education for our EMPOWER ASIA kids is our absolute priority. If our Khmer people had not taken Sararn in to live with them back in 2002 he could never have got out of the poverty trap. It would have been impossible. For that is poverty … the inability to rise above ones current status.
Sararn is the hope of his family who still live in the same house (pictured left).

If you want to know more then you can go to www.empower.asia
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