Gymea Baptist | empower / love / engage

Project name:         Smiles in the Slum

Agency:                   Samaritan's Purse           

Country:                  IDP Camps - Cambodia 
                                 (IDP: Internally Displaced People)

Tax Status:             Tax Deductible

Target:                    $30 000.00        

RAISED:                  $62,461.70

Project Update: If you would like to read an update on the achievements that have been made to date as well as the planned activities for Smiles in the Slums in 2010 please click here.

This project will see local churches mobilised to care for the orphans and vulnerable children in Cambodia’s growing “internally displaced people” (IDP) camps, where the poor are being sent as defacto refugees in their own country.  Cambodia’s poorest are becoming IDP’s by the thousands because of land grabbing by Cambodia’s rich and powerful – a practice that has become standard operation by the Phnom Penh municipality. Due to economic hardship for IDP’s located outside the city, parents are often forced to leave their children alone, even those five years old

and younger, in order to find work.  In these cases children are found wandering around the camps, where they can become victim to disease from the open sewage, human traffickers, sexual predators and foreign objects such as drug needles and glass.  The IDP camps are desperately inadequate to sustain families, lacking health care, education services, adequate housing, sanitation and employment opportunities.