Helping Poor Families

FCOP is a church and has always run “Church Homes.” The Bible is clear in Psalms 33:3, “Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.” We will never turn our backs on this, no matter how politically incorrect it becomes. The problem is, we have to function under a government that has swallowed a deceptive lie, that residential child care is bad, and we’re under a mandate to meet the “New Standards” by March 2016. The goal is to reduce the number of children in residential care by 30%. That means we have to find good homes for about 800 children. The best course is to find any that have a poor parent, or parents, and support them with food, or a grandparent. Uncles and aunts can work out, if they are really committed to love the child, but this gets risky. Foster care, with very few exceptions, just doesn’t work here, because orphaned, abandoned and deformed kids are considered cursed (bad Karma). And that goes far deeper than just a religious value. We have to believe that God will cause good to come from this and that the church will prevail.

In order to reduce the number of children in residential care, we are placing as many children we can with relatives and faithful members near the church. Most trafficked children come from those who are separated, so we will be very careful. We have been giving out food, bedding, and other commodities to poor families to help with this transition. We have done this in two regions with some success, the difficulty is that we lose control and only find out about abuse after the fact. The truth is that the percentage of children in Cambodia who are in, what the government refers to as “Residential care”, is about the same as the number of children in foster care in developed nations like the USA.

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