Photographs from Sept 07 trip

Racing each other to finish the wooden puzzle! The teachers went for a great 'teaching through play' course recently, and they've started to use some of the methods. Here, they were timing the kids as they did puzzles, encouraging and cheering them on. The kids were concentrating intently and it was just so cool to see an idea being put into practice. I've come to believe that it's mainly our staff who make change happen in these kids' lives - people connecting to people, the small 150-cap on each site, the relatively high staff-kid ratio - all that means a lot of individual care which these kids and families soak up thirstily.

Our current cooking facilities! We were thinking of converting one of the small rooms into a kitchen, as to add a full kitchen to the planned newly-built classroom here would've been expensive. A stroke of luck - our landlord has agreed to rent us an adjoining building which has a much bigger better kitchen, a huge workshop space and two rooms perfect for teenage girls (quiet, private and secure - for the kids who are boarding with us). It'll cost less over three years to rent than to build a similar equipped place, and given how things change so fast, renting is probably a safer bet! The donors for the classroom have been fantastic about the change. I've found our donors are really supportive because they know not just what we do, but why. New kitchen will be able to keep up with weekly boarders, some staff who eat with the kids, and two Get Ready classes - about sixty people!
Our school supply shelf - craft materials, games, stationary, spare bags - lots and lots of donated things, thank you so much! We have more in storage, but this is what's used on a daily basis.
The very first stuffies (stuffed toys) made by our Get Ready girls. The Mr Serious Bears - look at their faces! I found this super-soft cotton, some kind of suiting material, and Jolene drew a bear outline and the girls took a deep breath and started stitching. Some of the embroidery is really well-done, some is pretty basic, but what isn't as readibly apparent is that every bear is unique. The kids in the Get Ready programme have had their creativity withered by neglect. Individual creativity and independent thinking isn't encouraged as much, especially for girls in the slum, and they find it pretty scary to do something without a pattern to follow. So these bears are super special because they were given their own designs, their own stories and their own names.
Every visit, the kindergarten is a little bit brighter! Heli goes up to Phnom Penh tomorrow and has great things planned for the kindergarten programme. I am pretty passionate about kindergarten because when you have an educationally deprived home (no books, low literacy parents etc), it is really hard to catch up with other kids in grade school. Kindergarten gives them a real chance at grade school and we hope with our model, will get their parents involved and give them a range of play, discipline and nurturing skills that they can use on all their kids.
Three little kids watching through the door! We've been asked by other families in the slum for more kinderngarten classes, but we don't have the resources and our mandate is to focus on kids at high-risk for trafficking. We are talking about encouraging some parents to set up their own kindergarten, but that's a way off!


Acrobats! When you grow up climbing up and around poles, swimming like a fish and scampering up walls and across roofs, what's a little height going to do!
Emma, a british schoolteacher volunteer in Phnom Penh, with one of the kindergartener's 'books', a folder of their drawings and activities for them and their parents. The idea comes from the New Zealand Playcentre folders (hi Wanganui East!) and the kids love them.
One group of kids caught mid-running about and when they saw the camera, instantly flinging their arms around each other for a photo.
Our home-made posters on brushing your teeth!
Kindergarteners practising their Khmer handwriting - such neat big letters!
Rainy season means the river has risen and flooded under the houses. Most of the slum houses are built on stilts, and it's only very rarely that the taller houses will be flooded. But the poorest families in the slums will rent space under a house, in the overhang of another shack, and for them, rainy season means packing up what you can and shifting further away, finding a smaller more cramped space or sleeping on the roadside because the 10 ft sq spae you once slept in with your family is now underwater.
Shh! Fast asleep during grade school class. Everyone was whispering around him, even the teacher.
One of the weekly boarders, a bright silly funny wee guy who has just blossomed - his favourite activity, after wooden puzzles and chasing other kids, is having showers. He was the cleanest kid I've ever seen, delighting in brushing his teeth and washing his hair, a huge shift from the grubby little guy I first met months ago.
A bit of styrofoam and some toys and we have a house to play with!
Wooden puzzles were the big hit of this month's new toys arrival. The kindergarten kids love fitting them together, and I loved watching them with this one, khmer alphabets, because they would absently start humming and then singing the khmer alphabet as they finished it, switching to the A-B-C song and then back and forth, a whole babelfish of song!
The tuk-tuk we were using parked inside and all the kids took turns pretending to be drivers and passengers. These are two weekly boarders, terribly serious young boys, but on the motorbike they were laughing and making revving noises, just being kids.