Family
The Long and Winding Road: From orphanage back to family
Last week, we looked at about three considerations central to the process of reintegrating children from an orphanage, back to their community. Each step of the way, we work with leaders to ensure that we are able to get the best outcomes for the child, their family and their community. The safety of the child,…
Family reintegration? 3 things are key…
Well, it’s all good to say that we need to reintegrate kids from orphanages back to their families, but how can that actually be done?
Menghong: Personal Dedication to Keeping Children in Families
Keeping a Girl in School and Family It was a steamy midday in the midst of Cambodian rice paddies. Menghong was sitting across from Bopha*, a widowed mother of eight, under the shade of a mango tree. He had had this conversation many times before with other families. He wanted to search for the right…
Emergency Care: Meeting Chenda’s Needs In the Unknown
Courtney Smith is an Occupational Therapist and a technical advisor to the ABLE Project at Children in Families. She shared with us her experience interacting with the Emergency Care project and why it is a crucial first step in helping children develop healthy attachments. I recently worked with a child called Chenda in our Emergency…
Finding a Permanent Family
Chanty has been waiting to have a child to call her own for over 20 years. Today, she proudly holds the paperwork from the court to say that Dany and Sambat are her legal children. For the first time in CIF’s organisational history, over the last few weeks five of our foster families legally adopted their foster children.
Changing a Nation: One Child at a Time
Meet Naomy. With a gorgeous singing voice and bright smile, this intelligent, talented mother of two children – teenagers – has been our Program Director for almost three years now. She joined us from the collaborative organization, Chab Dai, where she spent four years serving as their Project Manager. Naomy is the oversight for Foster…
Foster Care: A Mother’s Love for Pisey
Success of a program (foster care) is best measured over time, looking at long-term results. In the line of work we do, we get to meet a lot of great families. Some are exceptional. Pisey’s* family is one of those. As one of CIF’s first families to foster and care for children, here is their…
Som At Video: Kinship
Soon after her husband died of AIDS and their possessions were sold off, a desperate Som At felt there was no choice but to take her young children to an orphanage. It ripped her heart out to “trade” her children for $30 and a bag of rice. Thankfully at the last minute she changed her…
Support Families, Not Orphanages
Explaining why you should support families, not orphanages, Friends-International put out a short-but-powerful illustrated ChildSafe video. They reiterated the same message Lumos Int., Children in Families (CIF), and several other organizations have found through research: most children in orphanages have families; they just live in poverty. Many issues stem from placing children into institutional care. The…
Kinship for Samnant
*Follow our CIF staff narrative on a field visit to check-in on a Kinship Care Family outside of bustling Phnom Penh. Names have been changed to protect identities.* “Do you want to go with me on a family visit?” My coworker, our Kinship Care Program Manager, peered at me from behind his computer. “Yes,…
Attachment And Bonding
A Safe Place – Attachment and Bonding We all need and long for a safe place – a location or person giving us space to wholly be ourselves and find comfort. Most people realize that they need relationships in which safety and freedom of identity exist. Clinicians call this attachment and bonding. But what happens…