My honour to join Riverkids to do Projects & Communications

It’s now my third week with Riverkids and there is so much I have been exposed to regarding information on child trafficking and the general situation in Cambodia. I come to know of a real-life account on how a young girl from Riverkids escaped from a foreign pedophile and eventually brought him to court.

On one hand, it saddens me to hear such a heart-breaking story of a girl raped on multiple occasions (this is the harsh reality, I told myself). On the other hand, I am relief to learn that a child’s bravery supersedes fear in this case and that saved her life.

Many children in the Cambodian communities we are working with are benefiting from our programmes. I love, in particular, the Get Ready Programmes. It is such a wonderful model that we are implementing in other nearby slums to eventually eliminate child trafficking.

Besides loading myself with a deluge of information, I am planning for a few major campaigns, putting together grants for Riverkids and corresponding with our donors. It allows me to leverage on my past work experience in business development, marketing communications and of course, my love for kids!

Next month will be another exciting month, I will come face to face with the people we are serving in the slums. Besides interacting with them, I shall be capturing many precious moments on my digital camera.

I will get to meet our colleagues there and I think the first thing I want to do when I meet them is to commend them for the relentless and conscientious effort that they have been putting in to give their very best to the people in need.

I will also get to meet other NGOs and am looking forward to learn as much as I can from them. I shall return to the blog to provide more exciting news!

Crunching the numbers! Our September 2009 report

Monthly Report in September 2009
46 pages, 950kb. Covers all our Cambodia programs in Phnom Penh for September 2009.



Highlights!

226 children had extra nutrition through healthy snacks and drinks during programmes
115 students were promoted a grade this school year
75 children at Steven House afterschool tuition, several absent from family problems
64 new students registered for the 2009/2010 school year at four Phnom Penh state schools
60 families were visited and counselled this month
57 children at Blum House for afterschool tuition, several absent from family problems and truancy
50 children in our choir, 66 in traditional dancing and 74 for breakdancing!
47 children in the Riverkids football teams
45 families had health counselling and checks
45 children in kindergarten, two absent (measles and truancy)
34 children in English classes, some absent from truancy or difficult schedules
34 children and families received the Food Box weekly support
30 women were employed making paper handcrafts for sale
25 students have to repeat the year, usually because of family problems and truancy
25 new grade school students with parents in sex work were interviewed and selected for our pilot Railway site
18 children were safe in our Weekly Boarding program
17 children required medical attention
15 girls in the Get Ready programme, one withdrawn for family problems
15 women joined a short embroidery contract job
13 children selected for places in our kindergarten
12 girls graduated in September, 7 returning to school, 3 to our Bright Girls co-op, and 2 for apprenticeships
10 pregnant women had prenatal care
9 mothers and 6 children had private counselling for serious family issues
7 children were fostered in the community with our support
6 malnourished babies and toddlers had extra nutrition under the Baby Bellies program
6 girls took part in the Bright Girls sewing co-op
4 youths represented Cambodia (and Riverkids) overseas in Italy for football
3 international volunteers taught English
2 rooms were repainted by volunteers from Singapore and the Get Ready girls
2 advocacy tours visited Riverkids
2 children were left motherless after a traffic accident, with the youngest entering our fostercare temporarily.
1 child entered fostercare due to domestic violence
0 child trafficking incidents!

Challenges:

• Kindergarten teachers have extra responsibilities and need more help
  
• English classroom is small and crowded
  
• Blum was flooded during the rains and needed repairs
  
• Lots and lots of work!
  
• Getting uniforms and school shoes and sharing supplies around
  
• Microloan programme that fits the high-risk urban community is needed
  
• A more private and safe space for counselling is needed
  
• Families skip appointments or refuse to take part in training and counselling
  
• Kids in foster care and weekly boarding need extra guidance
  
• We need internal receipts for expenses that won't issue receipts like street vendors
  
• The Bright Girls need two new sewing machines and training in business as they expand
  

Local Donor With Riverkids

Last September, one Khmer generous donor came to visit Riverkids with a large donation include medicine, rice, shampoos powder, milk, food for the kids by Riverkids.

In addition, she invited Riverkids staffs and 25 kids to participant in her daughter birthday with the purpose to provide opportunity for the kids to enjoy together with delicious food and happy party with her daughter.

We at Riverkids are very happy when we see the local people involve in charitable work. So now Riverkids can help over 350 kids to get education at 12 state school around Phnom Penh.

More Jobs for Women at Riverkids

Recently the mothers at Riverkids are so busy. They work on a kind of craft such as paper jewelry, which have been ordered by generous customer from Canada.

The women are so happy. In stead of going collect cans on the streets and at conner of markets in Phnom Penh, they can stay at home and make crafts, and they get income better than collecting cans.

Riverkids staff who in charge of micro-business has been so delighted and wrote to the customer

" On behalf of Riverkids Foundation, cambodia. We are staff members, vulnerable

children and vulnerable families especially the mothers and Get Ready Girls who participate in making hand crafts would like to say thank you very much for your generious order the huge units products from Riverkids, cambodia.

Moreover,through the demand of your order the women and vulnerable girls can earn the income to support daily food for their family.

Once again, we would like to thanks you. We strongly believe you will continue to keep order hand crafts from Roiverkids Foundation, Cambodia in the future.

Wish you all the best, good health, and successful in your work and life".

A Busy Time At Riverkids

In the new academic year (2009-2010), Riverkids will sponsor over 350 kids attending State school. This is a substantial increase in students from last year, due to over 50 new kids enrolled at the beginning of New Academic Year.

As a result, we at Riverkids are quite busy: we need to organize over 350 individual packages of school supplies and uniforms for the kids. There are always limited resources but each group of kids receives some supplies, with the numbers of books, pens and other supplies they get from Riverkids depending on their school grade - for example, if they attend higher Grade classes, they will receive more supplies.

Our educational staff and social workers also monitor the new starters for a few weeks to ensure the kids are attending their classes.

The first time at State School

We are pleased to announce that we have enrolled 35 students from the Riverkids Kindergarten class into their first classes at State school. Disappointingly, although we had a meeting to encourage parents to become more proactive with their children’s education, only few parents enrolled their children. Therefore, the first day at the state school, most of the kids will be sponsored and assisted by Riverkids staff, who will gather the young students and walk with them to their new school.

The kids at RailWay-II

Sister Dale Edmonds and an Advocacy group visited the home of sex workers recently. They were touched by the stories and everyday lives of the sex worker’s children: they don’t have an opportunity to go to school because, as well as financial difficulties, the school is quite far from home.

Sister Dale Edmonds decided to support 25 kids from the RailWay area to enroll at the State school as their first steps towards receiving an education. Each child received a package of school supplies, a school bag, and a school uniform. They are also given around 0.25 USD to buy snacks when they go school every day. A prearranged tuk tuk comes to pick them up, take them to school and return them home.

All the Riverkids staff, the kids and their parents would like to say thank you to Sister Dale Edmonds and all our generous donors who always support vulnerable kids in Cambodian. With assistance like this, we can assist more children to gain an education and give them the chance to improve their own future.

Graduation of Get Ready Girls

After six months of training at Riverkids, the Get Ready Girls have successfully graduated.

Sister Dale Edmonds, the President of Riverkids, spoke on behalf of all donors and volunteers and expressed her happiness that all the girls were graduating with higher self-esteem, a love of learning and a desire to continue studying at school or do further vocational training with Riverkids or another NGO.

At the graduation ceremony, each of the girls received a certificate to mark their achievement, noting they had completed the Riverkids Get Ready Girls training course. Riverkids were also pleased to award an Honorary Certificate of Appreciation to Madam Lynette Joy Edmonds, in memory of Roger Edmonds and in recognition of the extremely generous support they have provided to the vulnerable children to the Riverkids Foundation from the very beginning.

We also awarded certificates of appreciation to our local Riverkids staff and volunteers, who dedicate their time and energy to looking after, educating and assisting the children and their community at Riverkids.

Thank you to all our generous supporters!

One More Contribution for Riverkids

Riverkids recently received support from Oxfam (Quebec) to develop a cartoon film called “FAMILY VALUES”, aimed at making children and parents aware of the value of family and education.

The cartoon hopes to address situations like those of the Riverkids community, where parents will often send their children into busy streets on their own to collect cans – a story reflected in the film.

It has been broadcast on local television channels since the beginning of October, 2009 and will run until February 2010.

Riverkids has also co-operated with another NGO, Pha Ponlue Seilbak, to develop a cartoon book to accompany the film. We aim to distribute the book for free to other NGOs and public schools around Cambodia, aiming for the largest possible exposure to the story.

We believe that cartoon films and books such as these, which outline initiatives like our child trafficking prevention project, are more accessible to the community. We also hope that they will help encourage more families and local communities to look after vulnerable children.

On behalf of the Riverkids Foundation, I would like to thank Oxfam (Quebec) and the Canadian people, who provided their own money to help fund our child trafficking prevention mission in Cambodia.

Some notes from Riverkids Community Nurse

When the first Advocacy group visited the Railway group, home of a number of sex workers, we met a two year-old boy HL. He had problems with his testicles (Estrangement Erniaire) and our visitors felt sorry for him - he was in severe pain but his mother was unable to send him to the hospital. Luckily, our visitors promised to pay for his surgery.

On October 16 2009, with the assistance of the Riverkids community nurse, HL was sent to receive surgery at Khien Khlang, one of the charity clinics in Cambodia. He is currently under recovery from the surgery.

We at Riverkids and the mother of the boy want to thank you so much for the generous support. With your help, we are able to assist more vulnerable kids in Cambodia.

In another case at the Railway group, the community nurse of Riverkids met a lady who works as sex worker. She is currently 8 months pregnant. She’s never gone to a medical check up and her body is swollen.

The community nurse provided some advice relating to pre and post maternity care, and assisted her with taking a simple blood test. She doesn’t have much money and now that the birth is due any day, we at Riverkids are looking for generous donors to support her during maternity leave.






The homeless sex worker

SN is 27 year old. She works as sex worker and a beer girl. She has a one month old-daughter. Her husband is drug addicted and sometimes beats her. The first time we met her, we felt incredibly sorry for her and touched - she had black eyes and couldn’t see clearly due to the swelling.

She does not enough money to rent a room. She live underneath a neighbor‘s house which is full of sewage and very bad smells. Riverkids have provided some toiletries such as baby clothes, sarong, soap toothpaste and toothbrush etc. but as always are looking for further help to assist people like her.

Quick Singapore update!

Holly screend last night as part of a local film festival, and I took part in a discussion afterwards for Riverkids with Sallie, a Singapore-based academic, and Katrina, a UNIFEM volunteer.

I couldn't watch the film as a movie, because I was too fascinated by their accuracy. There are some quibbles - a line about adoptions as a cover for human trafficking, when it was baby buying and laundering, Holly's lack of basic Khmer - but they did a lot of background research and it shows.

Thuy Nguyen who plays Holly is wonderful to watch, because she reminds me of some of my favourite kids in the Riverkids program (I know, we're not supposed to have favourites, but there are some kids who just stand out in memory!), the street-smart and defiant ones. They're hard to reach, but once you get through to them, they'll do more than survive, they'll flourish.

Well worth buying the DVD (Amazon). It was rated M18 here in Singapore, but I'd be comfortable with a smart teenager watching as there's no on-screen sex, only implications.

We're super busy getting new shop items tagged, photographed and added to the shop, and updating the website, plus a long to-do list from the Cambodia team, but the great news is that Riverkids has received some excellent applications for the Project Manager post.

Fingers crossed, we'll have a post this October welcoming the new member of our team.

Snapshots from the September 21-23 advocacy trip

1. A brothel worker rubs my shoulders inexpertly as a cover for our interview in the grubby room. There are brightly-coloured posters of houses and gardens plastered to the walls, and a sheet hung up as a curtain over a window. It's not her room - they haven't got places of their own, she explains, they just sleep where they can, because they are always working. Where does she keep her things, I ask. In a plastic bag under one of the other beds, she says. She's the only single woman working there. The other six women have children, husbands or boyfriends. She keeps 30% of her fee, just over $2 for sex. I slip her $5, our interview rate, out of sight of the brothel owner.
   
   
2. At the Vietnamese slum, it was like stepping back eight years to the first slum Riverkids worked in, now demolished: kids running around, laughing and playing, and then suddenly the girls at 11,12 onwards are gone. 25 teenage boys, they reckoned for this community. Seven girls, all working "at night". The rest are gone.
   
   
3. Little girl, 2-3 years old, scowling at me when I tried to make her smile, then turning and running after the other children, laughing. Sold for $50 to another family, then dumped when she turned out HIV positive.
   
   
4. A beautiful teal-blue strapless dress with a short bubble skirt and intricate ruching, the singer shyly admitting that she wasn't sure quite how many dresses she had and then more confidently, about her plans to pay for a tailoring course so she can quit the beer garden. She lost her job as a receptionist when the company closed, but this, she said firmly, is not her future.
   
   
5. A small boy with probable cerebral palsy stays with his relatives in the slum. He's thin and cries out to the Riverkids nurse for milk. After several interviews, what seemed to be neglect turns out to be a family struggling to do the best, turned away by doctors, trying to find food he can manage and a pair of doting cousins carrying him around. We're helping with leg braces, liquid nutritional supplements and physiotherapy. He holds on tight to the little toy car he's been given, then waves it at his cousin with delight.
   
   
6. Lunch with a young woman from a tiny village in one of the poorest provinces, hoping to start university. She wants to be an architect. Her mother kept her and her sister in school even though they had to go without anything else because her father, who died in 2003, made her promise that the girls would stay in school too, believing that his daughters deserved the same education as his sons. She's tall for a village girl, tall and loved and volunteering at the local temple, teaching english and so earnest.
   
   
7. Stepping carefully across the flooded floor of the one-room to sit on the single bed and talk by a dim fluorescent light to a heavily pregnant thin lady, and watching her eyes flick past us to check on her little girl playing behind us, then to the door where her husband waited patiently for us to finish. A love story - they married young and her husband and her were trying their hardest, but she'd had to quit her job at the garment factory when the fumes made her painfully ill this pregnancy. Her daughter's hair is streaked from malnutrition.
   
   
8. "I had an abortion yesterday," she said when we are asking the three sex workers we were visiting about contraception. She touched her abdomen gently and then explained that it wasn't the herbs or medicine, but that she was lucky, an NGO (one I know that does good work) helped her get to the hospital for a D&C. "Why the hospital?" I asked. Because she started bleeding after the police beat her when they had arrested her for prostitution. And she has HIV.
   
   
9. The police will take your money, they said. All you earn that night, then your jewelry if you have any. Sometimes they are polite and they pay for the sex. But sometimes they don't.
   
   
10. "What about this girl?" one of the women said later, when we were all standing in a group around the railway, saying goodbye to the women who had talked with us. She pointed to a girl with her hair tucked up, leaning against a woman in her forties in pyjamas. "Has she been to school before? Is she working? What about her family?" A little bit - she can write her name, no, only collecting garbage, just her mother as a sex worker and she has, you know, problems, mental problems. Not the girl, they assured us. She's a good girl. Can we help her?
    
    The staff talked quickly. Thursday, our fourth group of Get Ready girls graduate, and the fifth group starts. We have two places left. If her mother brings her, if the girl wants to -yes. And the food box, so she can study fulltime, yes. Be there on Thursday, we tell her. You can do this, give your daughter a chance.
    
    And she does come, with her hair clipped back neatly, clean shoes and incredible shyness, to watch 13 girls graduate from the Get Ready program (six back to school, seven to vocational training), and to meet the rest of her new class.
    
    
11. The Vietnamese-style coffee at the tourist sex bar is very good. I drink, with a headache from awful taiwanese beer I bought at the beer garden earlier when we talked to the singer, while the tour talks to another bar girl. Her story is practiced, a sob story. She needs money, she has a sick child - there's something off about it, or maybe it's just that the women here are even more artificial. The men want to pretend that they're carefree asian girls, that they sleep with strangers because they genuinely like them, that they enjoy sex for cash. Their english is good, but after the beer garden, where the women relax out of sight of the customers, where they sing for pleasure as well as pay, where it's Khmer, not a bad copy of a Phuket bar, they look exhausted and harsh.
    
    
12. The Vietnamese-style coffee at the "coffeeshop" is terrible. Plastic loungers lined up to face two televisions. All men, drinking a bit, talking. We go in and conversation falters then starts again. My staff - Soklee! - talks to the man sitting near us. He's a boxer, he comes here in the mornings to relax. They work in the markets, as motodrivers, it's just a friendly place to drink. We look at the upstairs balcony, shut off almost entirely with wooden panels, at the group of young waitresses bringing the men drinks. Soklee goes to pay the bill, and to ask questions away from the foreigners.
    
    The owner, a woman, says oh yes, they're all cousins that she helps with good jobs waitressing in her shop. Free room and board. She doesn't know about if they go with customers or not, she tells them not to, but sometimes they don't listen. She pays them $50 a month too. Where do they come from? The countryside, when she visits her home province, the mothers, they ask her to help find them jobs. The waitresses are dressed in nice clothes, with small jewelry, handphones. She claims they make less than the woman, standing barefoot in her flooded slum room, ever did at her 12-hour 7-day garment factory job did. None of them look related. The men look away, embarrassed.
    
    
13. But it's like a pub in a developed country, isn't it? There are sex workers everywhere. But choice - when you choose to become a sex worker, when you could change to a job that paid as much, that had the same hours so you could take care of your children and feed them, rather than hoping you might have family, a husband (gone, they say, over and over, gone. Another woman, to work somewhere, he beat me, he ran away, he died maybe. Gone.) A husband, a father means the difference between your children surviving or selling yourself to strangers - and someone asks me, puzzled, why do the women want children with their husbands? why do they let their husbands beat them, be so cruel? Because here, a bad husband is still so much better than no husband, than despair.
    
    
14. We look at fat babies, nursed and talk about breastfeeding and slings, and why Cambodian women don't scream when they give birth. Some do, the women say at last, our nurse included, but the doctors and nurses don't like it usually. They will tell you to be quiet or the baby dies. And you scream, one of the mothers says, what's the point? It still hurts the same.
    
    I try to explain the Khmer code for women, that to be quiet, to never react to pain, is the ideal. I wonder why the code for men is not as widely known.
    
    
15. We change at the last minute to visit a different school. We're annoyed with the school where most of our children go, the one that's physically closest. The bathrooms have been broken for a long time, and the director admitted that they had the funds to repair it, but they had kept it instead. We offered to repair the bathrooms in exchange for a discount on the unofficial daily school fees for our children, but they'd rather collect more bribes. The school is slowly falling apart, and the last time I saw the senior staff, I counted the number of gold rings on their hands.
    
    
16. We visit a school where 24 of our children, older ones that can cross the busy streets between it and their slum home, go for free. The headmaster waived the fees for NGOs, charges a fixed daily fee for the others - I walk in the gate and stop. Painted signs, neatly tended gardens, children running around and playing, but not hitting or screaming. Teachers walking through with children asking them questions, not ducking away. I look into a classroom and gasp - posters, homemade artwork, good schoolwork hung up on display - it's beautiful, so beautiful.
    
    The headmaster, I'm asked - is he rich? He looks rich. I'm puzzled, and then I realise what they mean - he has one ring, a clean pressed shirt, and tidy dark pants. Look at his shoes, I whisper. Sophon had shoes like that once, still does. His shoes are cracked at the side, worn out from use. The shirt is pressed by his wife, his ring modest by local standards.
    
    I ask who paid for all the improvements, the little fence around the garden for the pet rabbits, the paving stones so the children can play in wet weather, the playground equipment - parents, he says proudly. They saw that we tried to work hard, that we are doing better, and then they give a little, some more. Later, we are talking about a donation from us so we can enroll more students, and he says can the school top up the donation so they can get better quality equipment? I feel like I should pinch myself. Does this school really exist?
    
    
17. "She's just like a limp pillow," he said. A man complaining to the parents of a 14-year old girl he'd bought in Cambodia that she wasn't affectionate enough in sex.