Yang Wei-Lin
Daughter of Cambodia By Raycine Chang
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If you don’t have faith, you shouldn’t be in this business
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Back in 1988, Yang Wei-lin was passing through Bangkok Airport when she saw over a hundred shabbily dressed Cambodian refugees waiting in transit to fly to the United States. The then China Airlines stewardess learnt that there were thousands more refugees at the Thai border, desperate for help.
She was deeply moved, so much so that the following year, she resigned from her job and joined the Thai-Chinese Refugee Service (TCRS) established by the Chinese Association for Human Rights. Yang began working in refugee camps run by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) at the Thai border, helping Cambodians rebuild their lives and homes in the aftermath of the war.
In recalling her daily brushes with disaster and death, she says, “The more I gave of myself, the more people I found that needed help. The demand for manpower, resources and money was endless. We had to be extremely determined and dedicated in order to deal with the situation.”
In 1995, the native of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, founded the Field Relief Agency (FRA) to train teachers, build schools and homes for street children in Cambodia. FRA’s beneficiaries include ethnic Chinese as well as Cambodian families.
For more than a decade, she has acted on her belief in ending poverty through education. Yang has mobilised an army of Taiwanese workers to help Cambodian children through fundraising to build schools and libraries, train teachers, and provide textbooks and stationery. To date, over 70,000 children have benefited and many families are living better lives thanks to her work.
Yang successively opened a village job-training centre that assists Cambodians working towards independent living by providing accommodation, job training, education, emergency aid and interest-free loans.
Her dedication to the Cambodian people has led to another name, “Daughter of Cambodia”. The Cambodian government has also conferred the “Medal for International NGO Assistance in Cambodia’s Post-war Reconstruction” on her.
“It is gratifying to see peoples’ lives change for the better because of our continuing efforts,” says Yang. “It also helps me to see my mission more clearly.”
For more information on Yang Wei-lin’s work, go to www.fra.org.tw.
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