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.

 

Finishing the new garden and flower beds

The gardening project continued in March.

The walls of our new flower beds needed to be painted and nicely decorated – Kea has good artistic skills and painted different kinds of vegetables on the walls of the vegetable beds.

Caterina and Lungdy made hanging flower pots from coconut shells which are now decorating the roof in front of our center.

The children like to be involved looking after the plants. They love to water them and really take care not to throw garbage into the flower pots. They even incorporate the flowers into their role plays…

The flowers apparently like it too at Goodwill – they are blooming and blooming.

 

February 2012: Our youngest jigsaw puzzle expert

Korlab who used to be our jigsaw puzzle queen has got a competitor: since she showed her almost 3 year old niece Vanica the first jigsaw puzzle, the little girl is excited by her new skills and is eager to complete a few puzzles every day all by herself.

 

Garden project

Caterina from Italy is a psychologist and has a lot of experience with gardening projects in various developing countries. She donated to the school lots of plants and two new flower beds. (see her website: www.rainbowbelize.org).

Thanks, Caterina!

 

Everyone from the staff to the youngest child helped to build and paint the walls of the garden beds, to sow vegetables, and to carry purchased plants from the truck at the main road up the small lanes to the center.  To collect soil from the village, the staff and older children used a wheelbarrow and shovels, whereas the little ones  used small plastic bags to help…

 

Beach trip

Finally, at long last and after many promises, we were able to take our smaller children to the beach. We all had a wonderful time, staff and volunteers but of course, above all, the children. They are now asking almost daily when we will take them to the beach again.

 

Carnival in the streets of Sihanoukville

Another highlight of the month was the yearly Carnival Parade through the streets of Sihanoukville organised by M’lop Tapang Center for Street Children.

The subject of this year’s Carnival Parade was traffic and road safety.

Cambodia is a developing country with increasing numbers of road traffic so the subject of traffic and road safety issues is a very very important concern, especially considering the disregard shown by most road users toward road rules, regulations and general driving courtesy issues.

We took two groups of our children to join the parade on two subsequent days.