1. They often use women as middlemen.
2. They lie and promise bright futures.
3. They always talk about a good job for the child or the teenager.
4. They pay several months’ salary in advance, which might mean
anything from 40 to 150 dollars.
5. They are, in general, smiling and acting in a reassuring manner.
6. They are soulless middlemen, to whom the human being is a piece
of merchandise like any other.

The traffickers’ targets

1. Poor families who have to work hard to feed their children.
2. Single women with many children.
3. Orphans or children who are neglected by their parents, and who live with elderly people who have taken them on.
4. Illiterate families without too much scruple, who make believe that they are tricked by the traffickers (and yes, this is quite common).
5. Families that hope that their children will be happier elsewhere, and that they will finally get enough to eat.





Our qualities

1. A small, closely knit team which has proven to be very effective in the field.
2. Excellent in identifying children who belong to the high-risk groups.

3. Our Khmer and Western volunteers work out of idealism, and
without a salary.
4. We perform real miracles with very small means.
5. We have excellent schooling results, and we are following the
pupils very closely
to see that they go to school, and continue to go to school.
6. We have patience, and we work in all kinds of climatic and
social conditions.
7. We work for long term goals, and we meet the families and
the children in their homes, but also in school.
8. We have cultivated straight contacts with the authorities,
as well as with the teachers and the headmasters.
9. We don’t create aid-dependant families; we give limited food
aid and school material for the children, but we also support the schools directly.
10. We support almost 200 children and 53 families on less than 10 000 dollars a year.
11. We strive to provide our sponsors with a maximum of information, because we believe
that a sponsor who gets respect for what he or she does, becomes a long-term sponsor.

Our flaws


1. We still don’t have a safe house for the children who live in really difficult situations,
and who would need to be taken away from their current circumstances (street children,
orphans, beggars, etc).
2. We don’t have enough money to take on the hundreds of needing children who live
in the surrounding villages.
3. We are a young NGO, and not yet big and established enough to get access to grants
from the big international aid foundations.
4. We are, maybe, a little too idealistic.

Sources: AVEC