In 2008, Keo Ravy and Amy Sullivan of Children in Families (CIF) drove to an orphanage outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to pick up two toddlers with severe developmental delays. They then brought the children to a rural village where they would meet their new foster families.
In the car, four-year-old Sam Ang, who was blind and could not yet eat solids, suddenly started violently banging his head against the car floor. Startled, Sullivan tried to stop him, unaware that due to neglect, this was his way of communicating hunger. As Sullivan pulled him into her lap, he began to calm down as he felt her face with his hands.
Sullivan, a CIF volunteer, recalled feeling worried about whether his foster mother would be able to care for him.
Yet that anxiety dissipated as they pulled up to the village in Svey Rieng province three hours later. A group of villagers stood by a house, waiting for their arrival. Ravy parked, opened the car door, and gently lifted the boy from Sullivan’s lap. Quickly, a woman ran up and whisked Sam Ang out of Ravy’s arms, hugging and kissing him repeatedly. She was his new foster mother, Pang Sokha. Smiles erupted on everyone’s faces, and several villagers clapped with delight.
This is the vision of the Christian nonprofit CIF: to provide resources for impoverished families to raise their own children or take in abandoned children instead of sending them to orphanages.
Sam Ang became the first of 76 children, most of whom have disabilities, to be fostered in the village and its surrounding communities. CIF has also supported 113 children at risk of family separation. Since domestic adoption became legal again in 2017, 47 families have adopted their foster children, transitioning them out of CIF’s program. (Cambodia made foreign and domestic adoption illegal in the early 2000s due to corruption and the lack of legal framework.)
“Our role at CIF is to help Cambodian parents fulfill their God-given responsibility to children, not to take their kids away,” said founder Cathleen Jones.
A different way to care for orphans
I first visited Sam Ang’s village in Svey Rieng in 2016, a month after I came on staff at CIF as its communication and media director. A coworker took me on her motorbike down a dusty path to a small farm on the outskirts of the village, where a grandmother and aunt cared for a little boy with cerebral palsy.
Abandoned by his mother at birth, the boy had been cared for by his extended family, who had little knowledge about his condition. He spent his first six years of life on his back, staring at the rusting, corrugated ceiling. After CIF intervened with medication, physical therapy, education, and the love of God, he began gaining strength and mobility. His grandmother and aunt caught glimpses of his personality as he started to communicate nonverbally. They pushed him in a custom wheelchair to visit neighbors, removing not only his isolation from the world but also their own.
I also witnessed a baby from a crisis pregnancy placed with a childless couple that had spent five years longing for a child. Tears streamed down my face as I watched them hold their dream in their arms for the first time.
This way of caring for neglected and abandoned children was completely different from how I viewed orphan care growing up, as some of my earliest memories are centered around orphanages.
When I was five years old, my parents moved to Mexico to work in a children’s home. We lived in humble but separate quarters, isolated from the other children. Most of the children still had living parents, but I was told they had been abandoned.
A few years later, we moved to Venezuela so that my parents could start an orphanage. The plans eventually fell through as the government began to create a more stringent legal framework around foreigners taking in local children. Still, I grew up believing the world was full of parentless children who were best served in orphanages.
That was an idea that Jones and her husband, Dale, initially held as well when they arrived in rural Cambodia in the early 1990s and were tasked with running an orphanage. Yet after caring for more than a hundred children, they realized that institutionalization left many with lifelong trauma that exhibited itself through addiction, difficulty bonding with their own children, perpetuation of sexual abuse, and inability to assess risk. They realized there was no good substitute for God’s design of children raised in families.
Globally, 80 percent of children have at least one living parent, but many families are forced give up their children because they can’t afford more mouths to feed. Due to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in the ’70s—which killed a third of Cambodia’s population—families lack access to basic sanitation, shelter, and food, let alone social services and birth control.
The Joneses realized that even the children without parents had extended family or community members who wanted to care for them. They started to wonder, Why not support children and their family units?
From orphanages to families
So in 2006, Jones started CIF, which focuses on emergency care for kids who were trafficked or living in abusive families, kinship care, or foster care. CIF provides each foster family with between $40 and $150 per month depending on the child’s disability, age, and medical needs.
In the beginning, it was difficult for orphanages to get on board with CIF’s vision. At most, they would hand over children with disabilities, who were the hardest to care for, while keeping the cute, healthy children who could entertain visitors and look good on fundraising material.
Jones also had to contend with the myth that Cambodians would not accept non-biological children into their families. After the Khmer Rouge, many families took in children whose parents were killed and raised them as their own. Yet as foreign aid flooded into the country in the 1990s, Cambodians started to see well-funded foreign orphanages as a better way to care for their children.
CIF believed the best way for foster care to flourish was within a community where several families could take in orphans and help each other raise them. Ravy, CIF’s Cambodia director, felt that the village where she grew up in Svey Rieng province would be a good fit. Why? First, the villagers didn’t discriminate against people with disabilities, which CIF observed in way local leaders showed respect to a young man with Down syndrome. Also, the village had access to a school and a clinic, it was safe, and it was close enough to Phnom Penh that CIF staff could regularly visit and monitor the program.
CIF and the UK’s Strengthening Families and Children came to the village to train 40 families interested in fostering. “You have the gift of time,” Jones told the families. “You have the space. You can give these children love. You can teach them to be Cambodian.”
The first families to take in foster children were Christians, as Buddhists in Cambodia feared that bringing a child with disabilities into the family would bring bad karma. But as they saw how much joy children like Sam Ang brought to the families’ lives, the stigma began to lift.
Other families in the village agreed to take in children with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and trauma. Soon, eight more children joined the community.
“Before we knew it, half the village had their hand up to foster,” Jones said. The waiting list grew exponentially, impacting surrounding communities.
When CIF places a child with a foster family, the paper signing and placement ceremony happen with pastors, village leaders, and other community members present. This way, the well-being of the child becomes the responsibility of not just the foster parents but also the community.
Families with foster children meet regularly to share their struggles and encourage one another. Having foster families grouped together also makes it easier for social workers to visit and address problematic patterns and concerns.
CIF has seen communities change their view of Christianity because of how the group involves the entire village instead of removing children from their families and cultures to mold their minds in an institutional setting.
When donors offer to provide wells or water filters, Jones and Ravy let the village leaders choose the families who are most in need of these projects, regardless of whether they are supported by CIF. Local staff also holds classes on topics like hygiene or parenting, which are mandatory for the foster parents and open to all villagers.
“[CIF] works with entire villages, so it’s not just our kids and families who benefit,” Jones said. “If a non-CIF family is struggling in one of our communities, we also support them.”
Orphanages’ chokehold
Today, CIF’s foster care program works in three provinces as well as Phnom Penh, each of which has at least three families fostering near each other for support. In total, it has placed 160 children into foster families. The organization says there are hundreds of vetted Cambodian families waiting to foster children. However, the organization recently had to pause adding new children into its program, as donations have dropped due to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 and donors looking to fund other areas of development.
At the same time, orphanages continue to house tens of thousands of Cambodian children because donors are willing to fund them, said Rebecca Nhep, founder of the Australian Christian Churches International (ACCI) Kinnected program, which also focuses on family care. Images of cute babies and children tug at donors’ heartstrings and loosen their purse strings. In 2021, American churches alone donated $2.5 billion to fund orphanages.
Yet Nhep believes the theology behind orphanages is flawed. When the Bible talks about looking after the orphans and widows, they should be viewed as a vulnerable family unit rather than separate entities, she noted.
Orphanages are also costly compared to family care. Cambodian orphanages receive about $50 million annually according to Sarah Chhin, the founder of M’lup Russey, an organization that helps young adults who have aged out of orphanage care. That funding could instead be used to eradicate the extreme poverty in Cambodia that causes parents to give up their children.
Christian orphanages see a spiritual dimension to their work, yet Nhep questions if it’s right to disciple children by taking them away from their family units.
“What aspect of the gospel promotes raising Christians by separating families?” Nhep asked. “We are told to go into the nations … not extract and take in, divorcing children from their social structure and culture.”
Back in the Svey Rieng village, Sam Ang grew up like his peers, riding bikes and learning to speak Khmer. With the help of CIF, the local school opened its doors to Sam Ang, making him its first blind student. Today, Sam Ang is training to be a massage therapist and is a competitive runner. At the 2023 ASEAN Para Games in Phnom Penh, he sprinted to a third-place finish in the 1,500-meter race with his sighted guide.
Sokha cheered him on from the stands, waving her arms and shouting, “That’s my baby!”
“Our family is so poor I thought I would have to leave and work in a factory to support my family,” Sokha told CIF. “But I love being a mom, and being a foster parent finally makes me feel valued for the work I can do as a mother.”
Erin Foley formerly worked in Communications & Media at Children in Families and authored the book Where They Belong: A Journey from Orphanages to Loving Families. This article includes excerpts from her book.
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