Daughters

"...But while knowledge makes us feel important, it is love that strengthens the church. Anyone who claims to know all the answers doesn't really know very much. But the person who loves God is the one whom God recognizes."

1 Corinthians 8:1-3

I've been working at Daughters for about 3 weeks.

Volunteering for an organization that brings girls out of prostitution and creates sustainable change in their lives has been incredible in so many different ways.

If there is one thing I know at the end of my time in Cambodia, it is that I don't have all the answers.

How does a country that has so many different problems, in so many different areas, change?

A country where a father will bring his son to a brothel at the age of 12 to "make him a man."

That father has no idea what manhood is about.

How about the father that sells his daughter into prostitution so that he doesn't have to go to work?

I have no idea how someone can even fathom doing that. But my real question is how does his culture allows his conscience to do that? How does a culture say that this is ok?

I came in with this idea that it was mostly foreigners who were bringing the money into prostitution in Cambodia, but what I found is that 80% comes from local Cambodian men.

When you rescue a girl from prostitution in Cambodia she needs to continue to make money. A lot of the time she is doing it to support her family back home. If you just take her off the streets and expect her to stay at a safehouse so you can give her medical treatment and therapy, you can make a pretty good bet that she is just going to run away and go back to the pimp so she can try and get her job back.

If you rescue a girl without her coming to you willingly she might try and escape for fear of her family's life. A lot of the girls have been kidnapped or sold by their parents. So if they leave the brothel they fear what their kindappers or buyers might go and do to their family's. So they try to escape.

I can honestly say my knowledge on how to stop this cycle of abuses towards Cambodia's daughters is none. It is a problem thats root lies in poverty and corruption and real change, on a large scale, is hard to come by, but not impossible. Countries have changed before, and I'm praying to see a miracle in the hearts and minds of the fathers of Cambodia.

But until that day, this is what I find.

People who love those that they can. They don't just love with their money, they love with their hearts, their hands, and their minds. They know they can't just put a cash "band-aid" on the problem. Support needs to be thought out and it has to have the girls (and now boys as well) absolute highest and best in mind. It needs to train them so they can find a new way to make money. It needs to give them an opportunity to permanently change their lives.

Sustainable change is what Daughters of Cambodia is all about. It's about helping and loving those that they can, and doing it wisely. Do they have all the answers? no, but they do have love. And one life at a time, they are changing Cambodia.

Please check out their website.

www.daughtersofcambodia.org