Pastor Abraham Hang is a Khmer Christian who has been ministering to his people for many years now. Abraham has an amazing testimony that would take many pages to tell, but in brief, he was born into a Buddhist family in the time of the Khmer Rouge and was expected to become the next ‘high priest’ (effectively the temple business manager with religious duties) of the local temple. Instead, God took him on a long and varied path to eventually becoming a Christian. He then trained with the Evangelical Fellowship of Cambodia (EFC, the governing body of over 80% of evangelical churches) in their diamond key project. After this training, he felt called to minister to the Andong Resettlement Village, and later to widen his ministry to include the northern province of Oddar Meanchey.

Abraham began work first with the people of Andong Village in Phnom Penh, in 2006 when 1,000 families were forcibly evicted from their inner-city homes and dumped in a wetland on the outskirts of the city. With little more than the clothes on their backs and a plastic sheet for shelter, these families lost access to all the basic necessities in life and there was little hope for the future in their new community called Andong village.

Abraham founded his organisation the Development for the People of Cambodia (DPC) and rallied alongside the villagers and set about meeting their immediate needs like food, shelter and clean drinking water. One of DPC’s first initiatives was to construct a modest primary school and provide free education and meals to the village children, the first in their families to ever set foot in a classroom.

From humble beginnings of just a handful of students, today the Andong Primary School delivers a first-class (and still free) education and meals to more than 550 students and is recognised as one of the leading NGO-run educational facilities in the country, so much so that our slum village children are outperforming their middle-class peers when going on to public high school.

After hearing of Abraham's work in Andong, the Governor of Oddar Meanchey invited Abraham to work with the rural poor in that area of Cambodia. In Oddar Meanchey unemployment is rife and families are often separated as parents are forced to leave their children to work over the border in Thailand. Building on the work done in Andong Abraham and his team at DPC have been able to duplicate the very successful educational model in this rural village, once again providing a free education and meals to almost 600 eager primary students.

Across both villages, DPC is transforming Cambodia. Not just through primary-based education, but now also through the provision of a high school boarding house and mentoring, tertiary education support, house building and income generation activities, clean water initiatives, and medical treatments to name just a few. It very much aims to provide a holistic approach to equipping these families with the tools to become self-reliant and free of the shackles of poverty now and into the future.

Tax-deductible donations to support the education of these children can be made through our partner Supporting Cambodia