Stories & Testimonies

Road trip! As you read this, 34 children from orphanages in Myanmar will be traveling back to their remote home villages to visit their families. During hot season (March through May), schools in this tropical Southeast Asian country shut their doors for their annual summer break. This provides our social workers with a window of opportunity to take the children with whom they are currently working out of the orphanages and into the rural villages they came from to visit their families.

“No one tried to help us,” lamented Khaw Leng Ting, a young mother who lives in rural Myanmar. Just a few months after joyfully giving birth to Mawia, her third child, tragedy struck—her husband died of malaria. Adding to that tragedy, her relatives didn’t offer her any support. Instead, they encouraged Khaw to send her children to an orphanage. After struggling for four years to keep her family together, Khaw felt she had no choice but to send her three children to a nearby orphanage in 2006.

Hung Maung didn't know where his brother was, where his mother was, or even where he came from. Aside from being labeled an "orphan," the boy had no identity, value, or anyone who loved him. He was all alone and had no hope of finding his family—if he still had one.