Hope School supports flood victims

There is a certain joy being involved in a school that serves the community.

As you may have heard, Cambodia is experiencing it's worst flood in a more than a decade.
" The worst floods in more than a decade have devastated large areas of Cambodia, causing 247 deaths, displacing 46,000 households and disrupting the lives of 1.5 million people. "
World Food Programme Oct 24 2011

One of our Hope Students had a vision (literally) of helping people in the province of Prey Veng. He announced to the school at the start of the week that he would collect food items up to Friday 3pm and take them to the province on the subsequent Saturday (15th Oct). He booked a boat and a vehicle and took the names of volunteers.

Without a single meeting held, the process began, families bought in a variety of products to be bagged into food parcels. Then on the Friday lunchtime, again without any planning, people started assisting with the packaging of the food items in the main hall. People drifted in to assist in unplanned shifts, a new array of people coming to replace those who had were leaving. This continued until 5:30pm when 386 bags had been completed! It looked like a lot, but was a pretty humbling figure when compared with the 13 800 families in prey Veng who needed food aid.

Each bag received a couple of kilos of rice, a milk product, two cans/sachets of fish, 15 packets of instant noodles, a hygiene product, 2 bottles of water, a cooking items such as soy sauce/oil/fish sauce and two snacks. There was also a simple note in each bag explaining the source of the parcels and the love of Jesus.

Naomi, Nathan and I each assisted with the packaging process. Nathan also went along on the Saturday to assist with food distribution.

So here is the story in pictures.
(You can click on an image to scroll through the images at a larger size.)

Sachets of sardines start to pile up

A collection of water bottles emerges

Stacks of other products start to form

Myself unpacking products

Naomi and Hannah unpack soy sauce

Naomi and Ain unpack cans of fish

The bags in neat rows and columns,with signs for ease of counting

Not much room left in the school hall

Nathan and Jesse on the boat to Prey Veng

The flooding (can you see the tin roof on the right? remember these are houses on stilts!)

Unloading the Boat

Families leaving after receiving food parcels.

Please pray that the families affected by the flooding do receive the aid they need to survive, that they may have been touched by the love of Jesus and that Nathan will take away life changing memories from the distribution day that urge him on in his walk with Christ for years to come.

Fiona