759 Cambodian children benefit from child sponsorship through Food for the Hungry. This student lives in a rural community near Anlong Veng.
Understanding. If we could all just understand each other, everything would be a lot easier. I see this in my personal relationships as well as the dynamics of working at an international non-profit.
Right now, I’m reading an update from a Hunger Corps named Katie McMurdo. “Hunger Corps” is a long-term volunteer program offered by Food for the Hungry (FH) — you raise support and go work in an FH field for three years or more. Katie is from Denver, but she recently moved to Anlong Veng, Cambodia.
Reading her update has given me just a bit more understanding of what it might be like to be born into poverty in Cambodia.
“Keep in mind that rural Cambodian schools have a lot of room for growth–most school days last for three hours or less, with teachers working either part-time or teaching two separate groups of students in the morning and afternoon,” Katie says. “The kids we saw today had already been to school and walked or biked the 10km back to Pralean in time to show up at our class around 9:30[p.m.].”
Katie was accompanying three FH Camobidan staff who conducted a Kids’ Club that night. This club is funded by child sponsorship, and one of its goals is to build upon the mediocre education offered in the formal schools (the ones that have only three hours of school per day).
At Kids’ Club, children learn basic language and math skills, English, health and sanitation, and Bible stories and prayer (where the village chiefs allow). The kids play games and sing songs. They learn that they have inherent value and can aspire to reach their dreams.
Sometimes, when I think of community development and alleviating extreme poverty, I picture clean-water wells, shiny new school buildings, and physical church buildings. I’m trying to make myself understand that the causes of poverty are so frustratingly complex that something as simple as a Kids’ Club can have lasting effects, especially in a place where the education system is so debilitated. I have to understand that while I don’t see a new church being built, the Church is being built one child at a time…inside each child’s heart. I don’t know all of the ways God is working around the world, day and night, all the time.
Learning to understand isn’t easy, because it requires me to admit I don’t have it all figured out. It’s not about who is right and who is wrong, but how we can work together to glorify God in our everyday lives; it might look a little different everywhere.
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