2018 CEDAR’s Exposure Trip – A Tale of the Border Towns

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(Starry sky in a Thai-Myanmar border town)

 

(CEDAR’s note: The writer, Dr Ho Shun Yee, joined CEDAR’s Exposure Trip to the Thai-Myanmar border towns and the northern regions in Thailand at the end of last year. In this article, Dr Ho shares her experience and thoughts about the tour. CEDAR will host another in-depth tour to Bangladesh to visit the poverty-stricken communities. For more information, please visit: http://cedarfund.org/trip/)

 

In mid-December 2018, more than ten of us from CEDAR arrived at the Thai-Myanmar border – a place that turned out to be quite different from the land of orchids, Thai silk, massages and water fights that most people would have in mind when the place is mentioned. There were cloud-shrouded mountains and singing streams, but what we heard was a song of a thousand sorrows from the border towns. Yet, in a way, it was also a song of hope.

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CEDAR Visited Rohingya Refugee Camp in Preparation of Future Relief and Development

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(CEDAR’s Project Officer Pui Shan visits a Rohingya family in Cox’s Bazar. The mother, who gave birth to a newborn baby, heard about infant vaccination service during regular household visit conducted by community health workers.)

 

While strolling through a muddy and dusty field, CEDAR’s Project Officer Pui Shan saw rows of tents sitting next to each other that were simply built by timber and canvas.

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Uprooting Poverty: The Perspective of Christian Faith

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[“SHARE” OCT – DEC 2018 ] FOCUS ~ Christian Response to Poverty

Written by: Raymond Kwong (CEDAR’s Chief Executive) and Jady Sit

In recent years, the international development sector began to emphasise the importance of human inner transformation for uprooting poverty. For instance, Cornell University Professor Kaushik Basu, who serves as the chief economist of World Bank from 2012 to 2016, shared in a public lecture, that no matter what kind of models of poverty alleviation is, one of the key factors to its success is whether people are willing to let go of some of their own interests or economic benefits and seek higher purposes, with which human being in general are common, and so, he advocates strengthening values education in society. This is about changing hearts and minds.

Impoverishment is a consequence of mankind’s broken relationship with God, with each other, and with the rest of the Creation. This broken relationship does not limited to the poor, but also to the non-poor. That is to say, for the sake of ending poverty, inner change has to happen with both the haves and the have-nots.

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CEDAR Fund & Integral Alliance Continue to Walk with the Rohingyas

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Since a renewed outbreak of conflict in Rakhine State of Myanmar in August 2017, another 702,000 Rohingya refugees arrived at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh; increasing the total refugee population to 915,000. Approximately, 1.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in the area.

 

CEDAR and other Integral Alliance(IA) members have been responding to the situation by not only providing support to the Rohingya refugees, but also assisting the host communities. CEDAR has allocated funds to support Tearfund Bangladesh and the Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) to install facilities like latrines, tube wells, solar light systems; distribute items such as cooking stoves and mosquito nets; and set up Child Friendly Spaces for children and youth to learn. In host communities, we will form Self Help Groups to help improve their livelihoods and increase household income and organise disaster management committees to build capacity of locals and refugees on disaster prevention and disaster risk reduction.  

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The Ever-roving Lisu

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One might readily connect words like “refugees” and “war” to the Syrians, the Rohingya people, or the South Sudanese.

 

In fact, besides the Rohingya refugee crisis in Rakhine State of Myanmar, another 200,000 people in the country were forced to be internally displaced from Kachin State in the north, Shan State in north-east, and Kayin State in south-east due to unceasing armed conflicts. The United Nations estimated that close to 172,000 individuals in these three states need humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, humanitarian effort is limited due to safety concern or inaccessibility in non-government-controlled areas.

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Me as an Ordinary Person

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[“SHARE” APR – JUN 2018 ] JOIN HANDS JOIN HEARTS

 

Amongst the children ministries of CEDAR and its partners, post-war children ministry in Myanmar must be the most well-known one. You may ask, “Why do we still support this particular children ministry after two decades?” The answer is simple: Because it is worth it. We saw how God worked amazingly on these children, and we hope that they will become ambassadors for reconciliation.

 

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