Graduation and growing bigger

November 15 2007 saw nine girls graduate from the Riverkids Get Ready programme. Four girls completed the six-month programme but will repeat again.

It was a beautiful clear day. Soklee had arranged for a small pretty tent over our new stage. Tida, one of the kindergarten teachers, baked cakes for everyone, and all the staff pitched in from persuading parents to come to the ceremony, to headbands for the girls to helping them write thank you cards. It was a family party in a way, a Riverkids family, relaxed and special.

Almost all the parents came with some sending siblings. The new class of Get Ready girls also came. Phy Sophon spoke in Khmer, then Dale Edmonds in English. Then each girl was welcomed to the stage for an official certificate and a yellow rose. Some of the girls were so overwhelmed they burst into tears. One father wept. Afterwards, we chatted and hugged all the crying girls and they took turns using the megaphone as a karaoke mike!

We had booked lunch at the Tonle Sap, a nice Khmer restaurant with a buffet. The girls were the quietest I've ever seen them, with impeccable manners. One was so nervous she couldn't eat but was persuaded to try ice-cream and then managed two full plates of food!

Then the girls went for a photo taking session at the studio nearby Riverkids Alexandra. This is great fun because they supply ballgowns, outfits, wigs, make-up and more. The photos are incredibly cheesy, but the girls had a blast and we have some wonderful group photos as well as studio shots for each of them.

Of the nine girls graduating: Two are back at high school with part-time work as kindergarten assistants. One has a job machine-embroidering for a reputable bag workshop. Three are setting up their own small business designing and making children's clothes. Two are training with placements as assistant cooks in a cafe, and one is in a housekeeping course for a placement in a guesthouse.

We are so, so proud of them. They have just thrived and shown such courage and hope and change. Thank you so much to Pachdey and all their teachers. Thank you Jolene and Sophon!

We'd also like to give a shout-out to Matt and Teena Ingram (on the left with Heli Kytola after buying lots of plastic boxes for all our school materials!) who visited Riverkids this trip.

Matt and Teena have mobilised their family and friends to sponsor a second Riverkids site, called Blum after Teena's grandmother.

Sophon identified several possible sites, and we have decided to go with the long narrow slum by the railway tracks. It's 15 minutes walk the other side of the state school our Alexandra kids attend, so we will be able to move between sites easily. There is only one other NGO operating there as far as we can tell, in another field. There are several hundred families living there with active teen prostitution and harsher poverty.

This November and December, we will be identifying children at risk in the community, introducing ourselves, hiring a local housemother and finding a small house for the first classroom, a grade school program.

Longterm, we hope to 'blueprint' Riverkids so we can open community centres in trafficking and exploitative labour hotspots across Cambodia, and even Asia. It's a lot of work to scale reliably and deliver even better care, but with Blum, we can start.