March 2012: Separating garbage

Garbage is a quite big problem in Cambodia. There is more and more plastic garbage, and usually, everything ends up in the same garbage bin. This makes it really difficult for the recycling people who collect cans, plastic bottles and many plastic cups that are used for every single sweet drink the children buy.

So, we decided to become one of the first places with garbage separation in Cambodia. Four garbage bins in different colours have been „decorated“ with paper, plastic cups and bottles, leaves for biodegradable garbage, and plastic bags for the rest of the garbage. It looks really beautiful and makes it very clear for the children which bin to use for what type of garbage.

Lungdy explained to the children how to use the garbage bins, but also explained about the importance of trying to reduce garbage. The children love to put their garbage into the right bin now!

 

Reading children's books

In Cambodia, there is no tradition of reading stories to children. We got loads of English children’s books. Lungdy now started to translate some of the stories into Khmer and read them to our children. He is a great actor, so the children are almost spellbound when listening to him.

 

Reading children’s books

In Cambodia, there is no tradition of reading stories to children. We got loads of English children’s books. Lungdy now started to translate some of the stories into Khmer and read them to our children. He is a great actor, so the children are almost spellbound when listening to him.

 

Daytime English classes

It’s been a couple of months now that we have established two English classes at different levels during the daytime. One class is being taught by Nain, the other class by Lungdy.

 

Playing

When there are no planned activities, the children play, and play, and play…

 

Staff training

We are happy that trainer Sokchea from Phnom Penh was able to come down to Sihanoukville again and conduct staff training sessions. This time, the subject was a more advanced one entitled ’Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. Some of the topics were quite difficult to understand, especially since there is not much background knowledge in Cambodia. But everybody enjoyed the training and benefitted from it.

As with the previous training sessions ’Future for Steng Hau’ (www.future-stenghau.org) financed the training costs, whereas the Goodwill Center hosted the training.

 

In the days before our guests arrived everybody helped to clean up the center. Some of our children also helped to make our guests feel really welcome by preparing drinks and snacks during break times and with helping the clear-up after the sessions were finished – while our neighbors were just curious to watch from under next door’s house.