FCOPI Admin

October 7, 2011

Food Imports Save The Day

With reduced rice production we continue to rely upon donated food items to meet the needs of the orphans and widows. We are grateful to Gleanings for the Hungry, Reach Now International, and Feed My Starving Children for their generous help!

September 3, 2011

Miracles Do Happen

Forty-two years ago, very few gave us any chance of success, but I had decided to marry Sou. The Illinois Farm Boy and the Laotian Princess had “zero chance” according to the hundreds of experts that offered counsel. The most memorable was that of my Grandmother, “Teddy, you simply can’t marry that girl. Why it’s like a pig marrying a cow!” We’ve hit our share of speed bumps on this road of life, but I just realized how out of my league I was when we ran into this old piece of currency used in Indochina in the late 1940’s. …

September 3, 2011

Heroes of FCOP

You live and learn. Roofs leak, fences break down, wood rots, and paint fades, cracks and mildews in our climate faster than in most. I started laying cedar shingles for my dad when I was seven. I put down my first tar roof at age thirteen, started with steel in my teens, done everything from thatch, to rubber, to plastic, to cement, to tile ever since. We had over six miles of fence to maintain on our dairy farm, and buildings that constantly needed repair from wear and the elements. Somehow, I graduated from cows, to pigs, to kids. Now, …

September 3, 2011

A Big Family

FCOP has raised and trained over 8,000 orphans in the past 13 years in addition to caring for thousands of widows. At any one time we have around 3,000 orphans under our care. A few orphans, due to their disabilities, will always be under our care. It is surprising to see those who become critics about orphan care due to the whole “dependency” issue. The very people who should be supportive, will grasp at that criticism for lack of a better handle – I have no clue as to motive. Although we’ve been caring for orphans for 13 years, I …

September 3, 2011

Earning Our Way

It is interesting to see the progress we have made in growing our own support. In fact, in our thirteen years we have never raised the cost of support for an orphan home. All those raising children know how much more expensive virtually every item from food to medical care has become in the past thirteen years. How have we kept sponsorship fees flat? By helping our homes become partially self-sufficient! If you look at the pie charts and cost breakdown pictured below, you’ll see in the pie charts that virtually half the cost of our support is raised or …

September 3, 2011

Incubators and Mushrooms

I’d hate to enumerate the number of ideas, seeds, crops, machines, and even people we’ve tried to make successful and come up with loss. We tried quail production three times, twice to get wiped out by bird flu. Now, it’s working! But I just read of a new flu strain. These birds are supposed to be resistant. Time will tell. Not to keep all our eggs in one basket (no pun intended) we’ve learned how to grow mushrooms in artificial steamed logs made of saw dust, wood chips, spores, various sundry and other interesting ingredients. After a few miserable lessons …

September 3, 2011

Zapped!

We closed the first church we started in Cambodia. Now, they grow like weeds. The Young Lions (our Spirit-filled youth workers) went to Odomeanchy Province and held a meeting with about 200 youth in attendance. About 50 of the young people were from two other denominations (names withheld to protect the guilty). When they witnessed all the young people who were being prayed for falling down, they protested, “Are you pushing them?” Our kids simply said, “No, they’re just being filled with the Holy Spirit. Do you want to try?” They all got zapped.

September 3, 2011

New Training

We’ve gone through more teaching and training techniques than I can number on both hands, then we met this “crazy woman who never finished 8th grade.” Her stuff works! Bar-One Ministries has become our new training partner. Just like every other worthwhile project we have in Cambodia, the progress is slow and tiresome. Beth Barone likes to train groups of 12 or fewer. That means we have to train a lot of trainers to get to 3,200 pastors.

September 3, 2011

Got M.O.U.’s?

PTL! We have our MOU’s! Simply stated we are legal to operate all our church orphan homes under Cambodian government sanction for the next three years. This was no small feat considering we are the largest fish in the pond, and had some of the top humanistic organizations in the world trying to send us to the taxidermist. There were a lot of other orphan care organizations that did not make it. One of our biggest challenges in getting the new approval was that we did not have enough playgrounds. We scrambled, spent money we really didn’t have, but got …

September 3, 2011

Containers Arrive!

Special thanks to those organizations and individuals like Reach Now International, Gleanings for the Hungry and Lou Binninger who do so much to make up for the deficits of food and produce we can’t grow for ourselves.

August 10, 2011

Lessons from the Farm

Do farmers make good missionaries? Honestly, I don’t know if they do. But I do know a few things I learned on the farm that have really helped me, and they aren’t necessarily the agricultural stuff. Farmers are optimists. Each year you have to invest thousands of dollars in a crop that may not make it to harvest. You learn to take the good with the bad, and always keep one eye on next year. You learn to fight, and innovate, and do whatever you must to bring in the harvest. You never give up. I guess that’s why I …

August 10, 2011

Great Harvest of Churches

Mak Sou just came back in from Khampong Thom province and visited a Divisional Superintendent (church leader) whom we had been reporting was watching over 32 home churches. Actually, he has 153 churches. Now, that’s a good crop! I have felt like we are fighting a chronic disease and that our yield would be down this year. A group of missionaries from Korea are buying pastors all over Cambodia. We don’t pay the home church pastors, and these missionaries will try to pick off the most fruitful by offering them salaries of up to $150 per month. We loose some …