Families In Need
So many children come from families in need. While the children and
families we support represent only a few, we would like to share their
stories with you:
Land Mine Accident Victims –
A family in poverty. In debt. Father and children head to the river in hope of catching fish to eat. They don’t have fishing line or hooks and so the father attempts to extract powder from an old landmine…the landmine explodes… A son traumatised, one daughter killed, another injured. A mother widowed, children fatherless.
With a farming debt, day to day life is now a struggle, let alone
hospital expenses, and a double funeral.
The oldest son, 10, has taken on the role of father, spending his
school holidays collecting bamboo and leaves for the roof.
Min Min Soe
Thanks to the support provided by our child sponsor Carol-Anne Smith,
we were able to provide Min Min Soe’s family with hospital and funeral expenses, and on-going financial support helps to pay for rice. The diligent mother is working to pay off her farming debts. Min Min Soe is also able to come and live in the hostels during the school year and continue his studies.
Tun Pa Pa
Ever since she can remember, Tun Pa Pa has had no mother. Left with her alcoholic father, her attendance at school was sporadic at best. On registration at school, her father could not even remember her name, so, according to Burmese customs, she was given a name based on the day she was born. The jagged scar across her face is a daily reminder of the knife wound she received from her own father for taking 5 baht
(15 cents.) A few days after her 8th birthday, her father was killed in a land mine accident.
The principal of the school took her in, but because she was born on a Saturday, she was considered ‘bad luck’, and so sent off to the monastery, her hair shaved.
When we first took her in, she had chicken-pox and a fever. She was unable even to write her name, though she had theoretically completed Grade 1. The changes – from when we first saw her in the hospital, scared and unaware of her father’s death, to now, where she can write her name in both English and Burmese, and confidently joins in with school, play and attempting to learn English – are amazing.
Thank you to Cynthia McMinn (Tun Pa Pa sponsor)