We are now fully active in the communities. Through our work, we are getting to know their challenges and needs in greater detail. We meet adults who share moments of joy and laughter with us, and others who struggle to hold back tears as they tell their stories. We see children glowing with the innocence of childhood, and others whose difficult circumstances are already visible at a young age. We are deeply grateful for these communities and for the openness they show our team.
Every weekday, we visit different villages and prepare each engagement carefully as a team. While we have already started sharing individual teachings on important topics — such as the value of education — we are also collecting data to better understand each family’s situation and the specific needs of the communities.
Two communities, in particular, have stood out to us. One faces severe challenges with access to clean water. It is a village primarily dependent on fishing, where people live in floating houses. The poorest families cannot afford clean drinking water, so they rely on water from the muddy inland lake for cooking, washing, and drinking. During the dry season, this water becomes especially unsafe. Not only does it get muddier, but all household wastewater is discharged directly into the same lake they use.
As a result, people drink too little water — and what they do drink is often contaminated. This leads to illness and weakness, and many children are unable to attend school. For some, even the walk to school in the intense heat would be too exhausting and risky due to dehydration.
This example clearly shows that simply encouraging children to stay in school is not enough. The support needed here is much more complex. We are now in the process of planning, researching, and discussing how, as a small organization, we can provide sustainable help to this community. Our goal is to work as closely as possible with the local people and authorities to ensure that we provide real assistance without creating dependency.
Another community is home to several brick factories. Due to the construction boom in Cambodia and neighboring countries, there is high demand and intense price pressure. As a result, these factories produce at extremely low costs, which has the greatest impact on the workers. For the protection of our ongoing work on the ground, we cannot go into detailed specifics about the conditions here. There are external reports available on this topic — for example, a CNN report from 2017 , which remains relevant today.
At this point, we warmly invite you to contact us directly if you would like to hear more about some of these sensitive issues. In this village, our work requires careful wisdom in deciding what, how, and when to act.
We are deeply grateful to the village chief, who actively supports our work and ultimately facilitated our access to these brick factories. Through him, we see a tremendous opportunity to create real change at the community level.
In this village alone, we are able to teach around 200 children each week, addressing different areas of life, sharing knowledge, and simply enjoying moments of joy together.
The other villages where we work also face significant challenges. With our small team, we often reach our limits, and there is always more work than we can accomplish.
But this is not a sprint — it is a long marathon. Every change and transformation takes time, especially when culture and tradition, past traumas, ingrained thought and belief patterns, and severe hardship all intersect.
With God, however, we have the right Boss and Partner by our side. We are also deeply grateful for every single prayer, donor, church, and partner, including SAM Global and mt:28, who support this project.
How about you? Is this the first time you are hearing about our work?
We would love to hear from you — contact us at info@serey.de -
WE CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
