The Safe Haven dream

Well, today was incredibly moving; we visited the Safe Haven, where children who are rescued from traffickers are given a safe home, education and the love of an accepting family environment. In addition to the 37 children currently housed on the site, a further 52 come as day students from local villages. These children are Cambodia's future. One thing that particularly impacted us was seeing the difference between a withdrawn boy who is new to Safe Haven, in comparison with the other children – the healing process that they are all going through has only just begun for him. And he's just 7 years old. It is truly humbling that we will be working with these children next week and we trust that God will use us as part of the healing that He's bringing in their lives.

And from there we went to visit an HIV/Aids centre, run by CHO and the government in partnership, to care for people who have been diagnosed with HIV or coping with the more advance stages of Aids. It's one thing to hear the statistics or read articles and quite another to see 5 women with their young children playing around their beds and hear that their husbands have abandoned them. Again, what CHO is doing is to help people like these women when all hope seemed to be gone. Even our guide was clearly choked by their situation despite explaining this to many teams that visit this incredible organisation each year.

Allison (18th October)