Why Cambodia?
| For the last four years, Warm Blankets has been focusing on providing
ongoing care to orphans in Cambodia. The tremendous need of the Cambodian
people, along with the profound number of orphaned children warrants
such attention.
100+ Church Orphan Homes are now caring for orphans there, but the
need is great. 52 thousand kids have lost both parents. |
The beginning of Henry Kamm's book,
Cambodia: Report From A Stricken Land, accurately summarizes the
problems faced by Cambodia in recent history: |
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"I don't think there is a good outlook for this generation," he [Andrew
Morris, head of UNICEF's Cambodian Health Services] said, speaking
deliberately. "The hope is for the Cambodians not yet born."
 Thus the understanding Englishman was writing off with pained realism hope
for a decent life for today's Cambodians, including the youngest, the
generation that is his professional concern at UNICEF. What is true for
today's children in this grossly misgoverned country surely applies with
even greater validity to their elders in a nation of more than ten million,
half of whom are under 18 years old…
Since 1970, when it plunged into the Indochina War, which begun with
Vietnamese rising against French colonial rule and lasted until the
Communist victories in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975, Cambodia has
suffered through the worst that this callous century has devised. It
struggled through five years of bloody civil conflict with the destructive
intervention of bellicose foreign powers, four years of a genocidal
revolutionary regime, then liberation through invasion and a decade of
military occupation by Vietnam, a hated and feared big neighbor, and
throughout these years unceasing internecine warfare on its soil, continuing
to this day. |
This bitter legacy is bestowed upon the children of the country. Society has
broken down in Cambodia and no sense of community remains. The population
lives in fear and abject poverty, with hate for the neighbors who betrayed
them. Corruption at all levels is rampant and the result is a country with a
moral fabric that has all but disintegrated.
Most discouraging is the seemingly endless supply of Cambodian orphans.
Decades of warfare have left Cambodia a nation with one of the highest
occurrences of death by landmines. In addition, rampant diseases such as
AIDS, coupled with the scarcity of health care resources, compounds these
problems into leading causes of death: all contributing greatly to the
growing orphan population in Cambodia.
If we don't care for the children and build for them a future of hope, no
one will. As orphans are introduced to the warmth and love provided by the
community and care found in our orphan homes, they will learn to heal their
society. There they receive an education and Bible training that helps them
become productive, upright, and moral members of Cambodian society. The goal
of Warm Blankets is to nurture and build into the next generation of
Cambodia people so that today's orphans will rise above their history of
despair to become the future hope of a desperate land. |
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