The Riverkids Funfair

On July 11, the very first Riverkids Funfair welcomed over 300 people and was amazingly fun morning!

Several months ago, SIA's 5Cs community service group contacted us to ask what their group of volunteers could do. We needed a short-term intense project that would make use of all those extra hands, and the idea of a funfair - well! Most of our kids have never been to a playground, and their families have few opportunities to be playful or loving.

So SIA's volunteers put their heads together and our staff worked round the clock and we had a big wonderful funfair, the first of its kind in the slum - not the last! Although next year, we hope it'll be easier to organise a second-time round.

We rented a small field across the road from the funfair and had a big canopy erected across it. Posters and decorations and games were all organised by volunteers and staff. Meals and snacks were ordered from another NGO and we had anti-trafficking posters from ION, water hygeine and bird flu posters from the Ministry of Health (all the posters were big hits with the families!) and staff from Hosea came down to watch then ended up pitching in. Children from Friends and PSE also visited us, absolutely well-behaved.


We arrived at just past 6, two hours before anything was meant to happen, to do the set-up and found nearly fifty kids and parents had already turned up *g* We set up games and displays at ten tables along the side, and a little stage at one end for our VIP guests and the speeches.

The highlight for me was the two skits our Get Ready girls performed. They came up with the scripts and costumes and practised until they'd memorized all their lines and did just a bang-up job. Each skit was 3 to 5 minutes long, the first one with children being tricked into prostitution, the next one with a girl getting hooked on drugs, complete with melodramatic death scene! The girls were very nervous at first, then warmed up and did brilliantly. Our kindergarten and grade school children sang songs, complete with hand-waving and salutes - the little ones clinging to each other with nerves. Lots of applause from the other children and best of all, their proud parents.

We were lucky to have several VIP guests, and a senior governor of Phnom Penh spoke about trafficking and working between the government and NGOs. Phy Sophon gave a speech in Khmer, Evon thanked everyone, and then Dale stammered for about five minutes about Singapore and Cambodia and how kids are the future. And say no to drugs! Heh.

Once the formal bit was over, we opened up all the games. Now, we had planned on 150 kids first, those in our program and some guests, and then a second session later on with another hundred-plus from the slum. However, once the games started, the slum kids started to slip in and within half an hour we were crammed full! It was chaotic, but the volunteers and staff handled the crowd brilliantly. One guest came up with the idea of tying string along one side to make out a queue for kids to swap their prize tokens for little toys.

We had a paddling pool with little rubber duckies and fishing poles for catch-the-duck, a lucky dip dart-board (hugely popular!), colouring pages, a little ball-pen for toddlers (they sat inside and giggled steadily for ages), facepaints and balloon animals and crowns. We had some games planned that had to be shelved because of the huge crowd, and my personal favourite, the cards-and-photo table.


This was a table where kids could draw and write cards to their families, then get a photograph taken. Some of the cards were drawn all over, some were just simple "I love my mother" in khmer, and in the entire funfair, I saw one card out of several hundred, lost on the ground. Parents carried them home, and the children - we have a ton of these, printed out in little origami frames for them - taken and shown off and the children asking for best-friends shots and shots with their mums and dads - wonderful.

The kids were really shy at the start about getting facepaint at the star, just swirls, dots and and and by the evening and - at by the end of the funfair, they had full-on football facepaint with giant butterflies, lightning bolts and the works. Very few balloons made it, though!


The next day, the SIA volunteers took some of the staff and the Get Ready girls on a boat trip to an island near Phnom Penh where the village mainly does silk weaving. One of the houses we visited had silk weaving looms under the stilts of the house. The teenage daughters and mum worked on the looms, and they explained how they worked and demonstrated for our girls. The youngest daughter was working on a white silk shawl and she let some of the girls try weaving. The one above is one of our youngest and she's full of energy, bouncing about and laughing. When she sat down at the loom, her whole face changed with total concentration and she was so proud of the tiny bit she'd woven.


The Get Ready girls are such city kids -- the rural village had fruit trees and so on, and they were *shrieking* with excitement over caterpillars, pineapple plants, water buffalos.

Than you, SIA 5Cs!