cambodiahyc2017
Hope Worldwide. Bringing Hope. Changing Lives.

Cambodia HYC

The 2017 Cambodia HYC will be a two-week long community service that will give participants a chance to celebrate the true spirit of Christmas – sharing Christ’s love to the poor and needy in Cambodia during your Christmas holidays. Thirty-eight years since the Khmer Rouge Regime has ended, Cambodia is still recovering from the utter devastation it had gone through during the 4-year period under Pol Pot’s rule.  Now known as the Cambodian Holocaust or Cambodian Genocide, the Khmer Rouge regime was characterized by political executions, mass murders, starvation, disease, forced labor, and the decimation of its educated and / or wealthy population. From mid-April 1975 to early-January of 1979 the regime was responsible for the loss of approximately two million lives. Today its capital city, Phnom Penh, is swarming with thousands of scooters and expensive cars, mushrooming with modern buildings, and crowding with more and more schools and medical facilities. Most of the towns and villages in the surrounding provinces, however, remain poor and underdeveloped, lacking basic hygiene and medical care.

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HYC participants will have the blessed opportunity to build toilets in public primary schools in poor communities near Phnom Penh. All throughout the country, most public schools outside the major cities do not have functioning toilets or clean running water, making Cambodian children susceptible to various illnesses that could easily be prevented otherwise. The campers will also get to participate in HIV/AIDS Home Care visits in poor and displaced communities near the capital. HIV/AIDS has been a huge problem in Cambodia since the 1990s, and although awareness about the disease has been raised since then, it remains a challenge in Cambodian society, continually driving families deeper into poverty.

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We will also visit the Goldstone School of HOPE worldwide ― a charity K-12 school in Phnom Penh that provides excellent learning for Cambodian children, and the Sihanouk Hospital Center of HOPE ― HOPE worldwide’s flagship project in Cambodia that has treated more than 1.3 million patients free of charge since 1996.

Although we will not be visiting the ancient temple ruins of Angkor Wat during this trip, campers will have the chance to go shopping, Go-Kart racing, and sight-seeing in Phnom Penh. We will visit the Royal Palace, and learn about the sufferings of the Cambodian people during the Khmer Rouge regime when we visit the Genocide Museum.

HYC Cambodia’s mission is to instill among our campers a deep and Christ-like compassion for the poor and needy. It is our hope that this kind of compassion would then translate into selflessness, hard work, generosity, getting out of our comfort zones to meet others’ needs, whole-hearted service, and great team work.  Participants will have daily early morning prayer times and discussion groups at nights to give them an avenue to draw strength and conviction from God, as well as process and share their experiences with one another.

Throughout the HYC, time will be allotted for phone calls home. We will, however, have a limited phone- or electronic device- use policy, so we can all focus on serving the community and connecting with God.

We look forward to you joining the HOPE Youth Corps 2017 in Cambodia, and pray that your experience serving the poor here will deepen your faith, increase your love, and impact your life like never before!

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