Baby for Sale, $500

There are horrors here in Cambodia that I haven’t even imagined. This week, in the village that my friend Sareth lives in, a lady was trying to sell her 8 day old baby for $500. She wanted a new start in life and didn’t want to keep her baby.

They tried to explain to her that they couldn’t buy the baby but they would care for it and see that it was raised well and got to go to school. Later they decided they could give her bus money to get back to Phnom Phen but they wouldn’t buy the baby.  She wasn’t willing to let the baby go, though, she wanted to sell it.

She left and they haven’t seen or heard from her for a couple of days. Her backup plan was to drop the baby off in front of one of the Casino’s. In the states it’s not a big deal to formula feed a baby but here they were mostly worried that the baby wouldn’t have good chance of making it to out of infancy.

In this picture Paul and Sareth are taking to the Pastor’s wife who had agreed to raise the kid. Paul was willing to raise the money needed to take care of the baby. It was really cool to see a family willing to take on a baby and the compassion that the christians there felt.