Project 621: Cambodia : Project Freedom Treatment Centre

Project Freedom provides counseling and rehabilitative services to children who have been physically and sexually abused as well as to their families. Besides individual and family counselling, the team also works closely with other organisations and groups in Cambodia to help these children to be reintegrated to their families where possible. Psychoeducation in the areas of life skills, safe and unsafe touch and positive parenting skills are also conducted to help the children and families.

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Field of Heartbreak Cambodia’s provincial villages provide the setting for Khmer Farmers to live out their traditional farming lifestyle, educating their children in the local temple school, growing rice in the endless paddy fields and tending to the chickens and cows who share their simple wooden buildings.

Each year the rainy season commences in July, bringing with it, flooding, that causes the rice shoots to grow in the paddy fields, but with it, the start of a cycle of tragedy. Babies and toddlers are left to roam the wafer thin edges of the water-logged paddy fields, untended and unsupervised.

Kampong Speu is such a place. Home to burgeoning numbers of young village children but each year, the place of tragedy for many young Mothers whose toddlers drown in the waters of the rice fields. The Fields of Harvest have become the Fields of Heartbreak.

Mercy Teams (Cambodia) is providing an answer in one such place. A pre-school Learning Centre is springing up in Kra Nhoung Village in Kampong Speu where Sonn a long time daughter of the village grew up. She has become a christian and wants to take the message of Gods love back to her many relatives. She also has a Dream that the other sons and daughters of the village, still young and needing nurturing and protecting, will survive the floods and live to take their place in Khmer society.

Mercy Teams (Cambodia) is making that dream come true. Along with the Pre-school centre where young children will be freely welcomed, will be Parenting classes, child health lessons, education training, and religious studies which will become a regular part of this Child Learning centre to help turn Kra Nhoung Village back into a joyful place, a Field of Harvest.

Cost of Project : $US30,000. Estimated completion : July 2006

The border crossing from West Thailand into Myanmar, is called Three Pagodas Pass. Centuries ago this was the spot where marauding Burmese armies marched into Thailand on their traditional invasions. In recent times, the 1996 cease fire between the Mon and the Myanmar government has ended hostilities and the border town now sells locally made teak furniture and synthetic gems and other trinkets.

The neighboring Japanese Well Village or PaLaing-Japan (literally Well) comprises 3-400 villagers mostly from the Mon and Karen tribes.

A small Church was built in 2002, not without some opposition, and now with the number of families seeking an alternative to the Buddhist temple school, Mercy Teams (Thailand) has plans to construct and operate a simple School on land offered in the village adjacent to the Church. 3 classrooms and a Teachers resource room will be built to accommodate some 60 children from the Mon and Karen villages.

Scarcity of water is a big problem during the summer months from Jan- May. Drinking water is drawn from a hole in the ground. Those seeking drinking water from the muddy hole, must compete with insects and frogs and boys washing their clothes. Typhoid and stomach ailments are a common result.

Mercy Teams (Thailand) plans to construct a proper well to provide clean drinking water facilities for the school children throughout the year, and the 400 neighbouring Mon and Karen families will be invited to use the well to draw clean water for their own needs.

The resulting chaos from the 12/04 Tsunami off the Coast of Banda Aceh, left thousands of Tsunami Widows, husbands swept away and families torn apart. But a new torture hit those Widows who were left behind. . instant economic and personal disaster, having to raise children and care for elderly parents with little prospect of work.
Desperately in need of viable Income generation Projects for a new means of livelihood, the economic needs of Women Headed Households (WHH) was daunting.

Mercy Teams (Indonesia), is now establishing a Fish Farm cooperative, as an Income Generation opportunity. Mercy Teams is working with an experienced Aquatic Veterinarian to establish on-shore Fishpond Farms. This is a unique eco-niche, for Tsunami widows who have lost their working husbands and are requiring employment to support their young families and elderly parents.

Project 673: Indonesia : Aceh Mobile Medical Clinic

With the commencement of Mercy Teams (Indonesia) medical ministry in Aceh province thru Dr Jeff Hall (USA), Mercy Teams will fulfill a long term plan to commence medical ministry to one of the most isolated and needy Moslem groups in Aceh.. the Acehnese Freedom fighters, who have for almost 30 years been fighting for independence.
The Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, or Gam) was founded on 4 December 1976 by Hasan di Tiro - a descendant of the last Sultan of Aceh and maintains that when the Republic of Indonesia was formed in 1949, the Kingdom of Aceh should not have been included in the package, since, unlike the rest of the territory, it was never formally under Dutch colonial rule.

Long-running conflict since Gam's inception, the rebels have conducted guerrilla-style attacks throughout Aceh, targeting Indonesian security forces. The military has responded by trying to flush out the rebels from their mountain strongholds. Over the years, there have been various attempts by both sides to bring an end to the violence - which has so far claimed an estimated 10,000 lives, many of them civilian and has placed most of Acehs residents in a low-level war zone
Foreigners - including aid workers and journalists – were not allowed into the region for some years and accurate reports of the situation were hard to obtain.

Since the 26 December tsunami, however, all that has changed.

International groups have been pouring into Aceh to provide aid to the devastated coastal regions, and both the government and Gam have declared a ceasefire to help aid get through to survivors. However, GAM separatists are now in dire need of medical help, as they have been highly suspicious of using government hospital facilities. .
Mercy Teams (Indonesia) wants to setup a Mobile Clinic to bring badly needed medical assistance to these ex- Freedom Fighters who are not only carrying untended war wounds but now Tsunami related injuries.
Est Cost of Mobile Medical Clinic : Medical Van especially adapted $US 15,000

Equipping Van with Medical Equipment $US 10,000

Over a 25 year period, more than 10,000 people lost their lives in a violent armed conflict between the Indonesian government and the separatist guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM. Thousands more have been traumatized by the years of unrest. Until the tsunami, these Muslim freedom fighters and their families have had little contact with the rest of the world. However, with the momentous signing of a peace agreement in 2005, doors are opening to build friendships in these communities.

Many aid agencies have been providing medical care to Acehnese victims of the tsunami, but areas farther into the mountains have been largely forgotten. Many of the villages where the conflict has been centered have little or no access to medical care. Sanitation is poor, education levels are low, poverty is great, and public health education is needed. The former GAM members and their families are often suspicious of using government hospitals, and the distance to reach any facilities is often prohibitive.

MTI Medical has a vision to reach into these troubled regions. One village's damaged and long-unoccupied clinic building was recently rebuilt by MTI, and we are now operating a general community health center for the rice-farming community there. In the past three months over 1200 patient visits have demonstrated the great need for care in the area, and we envision expanding in the future. Plans and dreams include offering public health education classes, bringing in surgical specialty teams, offering dental care, and potentially housing a local midwife for the community in half of the clinic building. The opening of the clinic has been warmly received by the local community, as has MTI"s construction of public toilets intended to reduce the spread of disease.

The village where the clinic is located sits among 52 others with little to no access to health care, and MTI is providing care through periodic mobile medical outreaches to some of these locations. Not only is this medical care greatly needed and appreciated, but it helps to provides MTI and our associated organizations with a warm welcome into the villages. These organizations have begun teaching English to children, engaging the youth in sports, and teaching women sewing and cooking as a new career skill. The Indonesia team believes that providing compassionate, loving, high quality medical care to the people there will provide needed healing for them at many levels. The needs are substantial in these areas, and there is great potential for both short and long term health care workers to join us. We would also love to have people interested in teaching English to the children, livelihood to the women, and engaging the youth in sports.

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