Janne Ritskes: Another Canadian hero in Cambodia

Srei, Community Development Manager, Janne Ristkes, Founder of Tabitha Foundation and Director and Heng, House Building Manager

March 27, 2012
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun

Janne Ritskes is another Canadian doing incredible work in Cambodia. She founded the Tabitha Foundation in 1994. Since then, more than 1.5 million people have graduated from poverty through Tabitha’s Savings Program. Tabitha has funded for: 7,002 wells, 201 ponds and eight water reservoirs, 4,094 houses built by Cambodians (all but two with the help of foreign volunteers) and nine schools.

“Janne Ritskes is truly a Canadian heroine,” Ian Robertson wrote in his email to me on the weekend. “Her approach to the crisis in Cambodia is to nourish and support grassroots development. One result will be, of course, that with such development fewer families will be obliged to sell their daughters into degradation.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to meet Ritskes or visit any of the Tabitha projects, while I was in Cambodia.However, I knew about Tabitha of the foundation because I bought some of beautiful silk products produced by Cambodians at Tabitha’s booth at Christmas at Hycroft. But that’s where I ran into Robertson, who I had met years earlier in Singapore where he was head of the Canada-ASEAN Centre. Ian and his wife, Bonnie, have been deeply involved with Tabitha ever since they went to Cambodia six years ago as volunteers to help build houses.

Ritskes was born in Holland and immigrated to Canada in 1951 with her family. She worked as a missionary in Kenya and the Philippines before moving to Cambodia. She first went to Cambodia in 1992. Frustrated by the lack of aid for Cambodians, Ritskes sold most of her belongings and started Tabitha Cambodia with help from friends and family the Australian and Canadian embassies there.

On the foundation’s website, Gordon Longmuir (Canada’s ambassador from 1995 to 1999) writes: “Not long after I was appointed ambassador . . . I encountered a struggling grassroots, non-governmental organization called Tabitha, directed, seemingly effortlessles, by an unlikely Canadian saint, Janne Ritskes.

“The ambitious purpose of this project was to give hope to some of the most destitute of Cambodia’s people in achieveing sustainable and dignified livelihoods.”

He says Ritskes was a member of the Canada Fund’s advisory committee and “brought to it her own irreverent counsel, often refreshingly at variance with official aid doctrine, drawing on her unique experience with Tabitha.”

To learn more about Tabitha, make a donation or find out about volunteering, go to www.tabitha.ca