Relief for Displaced Families

The families who had to leave

In the first days of December 2025, fighting flared along Cambodia's border with Thailand. I was far from home when it started, following it the way you follow bad news from a distance: through calls, photos, and numbers that kept climbing. Within two weeks, more than 490,000 people had been evacuated across seven provinces, and over a thousand schools had closed their doors. Most of the families who reached Prasat Village, in Varin District, Siem Reap, had fled Anlong Veng in Oddar Meanchey Province; others came from Banteay Meanchey. They arrived with whatever fit on a cart.

A ceasefire came at the end of December. It stopped the fighting; it could not undo it. Some families had no houses left to return to, theirs had been bombed, and many of those waiting in Varin were parents with infants and young children, starting over from a mat on a pagoda floor.

A call for support

I could not change what had driven them out. I could help carry the next few weeks. So on 18 December, ten days into the crisis, I opened a fundraiser and asked the people I trust, plainly, for help. Friends in Singapore, France, Belgium, the United States, and Cambodia answered with what they could, most of them for families they will never meet, in a village they will never see. The campaign closed at nearly double its goal.

Handed over in person

Money only becomes help when someone carries it the last kilometer. For us that was JCI Siem Reap and two friends on the ground, Boramey and Pheavan. Together we turned almost everything into food and essentials, bought locally and loaded whole, so it reached the families in days rather than months.

On the day itself, the pagoda did what pagodas in Cambodia have always done: it took people in. Everything was handed over directly, family by family, to around 130 of them.

The boxes turned out to be the smaller part of it. We stayed, sat on the floor at eye level, and listened: where people had come from, what they had left behind, what a week here was like.

Some of what we carried was not strictly essential. It mattered anyway.

What the delivery did not use went on to Eat More, a trusted team working in the displacement camps, so the help kept moving. Measured against everything these families had lost, it was small. But it arrived while it mattered, it was handed over by people they could look in the eye, and the smiles that day went both ways.