Causecast

Why I Participate

During my backpacking trip in Laos, I discovered so many poor children who needed help. The experience struck me deep into my heart and soul. I committed myself to help the children. I put electricity in homes to allow kids to study more. I brought water to the village so girls did not have to fetch water during school time. None of these things excited me until I built my first preschool. It gave preschool children an education head start, primary school girls were relieve of watching their siblings children during school hours. We provide children's healthfairs with free medical checkups, immunizations, medicine, vitamins, and emergency care plus we provide health, hygiene and nutrition demonstrations. We invite donors and doctors to join us on our trips. We bill our voluntour trips as an experience of a lifetime. One couple is coming for their fifth trip. One of our doctors is coming for her fourth time in three years. They want the once in a lifetime experience over over and over again. We are efficient and effective. Once the funds are in our hands, our schools are built within 100 days. We visit the schools, the children. We celebrate with the village leaders, families and children.

About Me

I worked for large corporations, have a consulting business and have my non-profit Give Children A Choice. I've had very exciting "over the edge" experiences, as I've traveled through Asia during the past decade. I've been fortunate to overcome handicaps to a point where I have time to help children in poor villages. In addition to our non-profit Give Children A Choice (www.givechildrenachoice.org), I've helped other non-profits get started. One that is dear to me is where I rescued a dozen primary school-aged girls from the Steung Mean Chey dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and placed them in a wonderful A New Day Cambodia center, where they receive healthy meals, love, care and going to school for the first time in their lives.

My Interest

In addition to continuing our efforts to build preschools and help others build schools in Laos, my burning interests for the moment is two fold. One is a project that involves distribution vitamins to 24,000 children in 576 villages in Xieng Khouang Province, Laos. Second, is trying to validate a model for accelerating the removal of millions of UXOs (unexploded ordnance) that were dropped by the United States in many villages during US's Secret War in Laos. Do you know that there are over 80 million unexploded bomblets, left by the US bombings 30-40 years ago? We just built a 3-room preschool in a village where three primary school-aged boys went hunting for crickets for dinner one late afternoon after school in 2008. Their parents and neighbors heard an explosion. The boys never came home.