Get Ready girls touring Intercontinental Hotel

A Singapore volunteer, Adeline, organised an awesome behind-the-scenes tour for our Get Ready girls from Alexandra at the Intercontinental Hotel in Phnom Penh. They went around the kitchens and staff rooms, talked to staff and ate a delicious meal. Tourism is a major industry in Cambodia, and we've placed several Get Ready graduates in hotel jobs. You don't need a lot of paper qualifications, but you need hard work, responsibility and people skills - traits we teach in the Get Ready program.

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Adeline!

Project SKY and Volunteer Khmer

Three of our Get Ready girls just graduated from a training project run by International Cooperation Cambodia - Project SKY! They had a chance to meet other young people from similar backgrounds who were also making strides into better lives.

They went for life skills training over several weeks in July. Project SKY is a short intensive course to equip institutionalized or orphaned youths with the kind of basic social skills you pick up in a family - teamwork, household management, what kind of work an orphan can get in Khmer society and so on.



Visitors from the Volunteer Khmer program came by to donate stationary and 60 notebooks. Thanks, Kimily and Louise!

Singing Contest!

Pheakdey and Sinoy planned our very own 'Riverkids Idol' singing competition for our Get Ready girls.

All the kids will sing a tune at the drop of a hat, and we've seen the microphones - even loudspeakers! - at events used for singing the moment they were left unattended. The kids love singing.

On the 20th of June, the concert found "the winner with the best song and sweet sounds", although presents went round to the top five! We even had a tie for fifth place *g*

Small fun events like this are a great way to encourage the shy kids and celebrate their creative sides. The Get Ready girls are often struggling academically, and feel hopeless. Getting to compete, with a real chance at winning, and having your friends support you - that helps.

Cooking up a storm

We're very happy to announce that two of our Get Ready graduates are now working as cooks for a hotel in Phnom Penh!

The girls graduated from our Get Ready programme then went for a cooking course at Yejj, and an apprentice one of our teachers arranged.

Their new jobs are basic pay with overtime, decent hours and a lot of potential for advancement!

Cooking has been added to our Get Ready program, with the teenagers learning to cook and bake. We have several keen chefs in our latest batch!

This week Thida trained them in making Malaysian sweet bananas.

As Pachdey writes: "...it's very important for them because they can learn together, help each other, share and also eat together like in their family."

Keeping head lice away!

There have been a problem with head lice the past few weeks, especially with the kids staying in close quarters. Hence, 2 weeks ago, a class was conducted, teaching the Get Ready girls how to prevent head lice. This is the first step to better 'hair' hygiene on Riverkids Cambodia! The teachers will conducted the same class to the kids at Steven House next.

Shampooing keeps the head lice away!

Presenting 'The Shampoo'

Graduating from Yejj.

2 of the Get Ready Graduates went through a month long cooking training at Yejj. I got to visit them once during lessons in January but I felt more like a disruption to the class than anything else. Try taking pictures of girls in class without distracting anyone. I ended up taking a few pictures and waited sheepishly at a corner to wait for Sok Lee to finish her conversation with the supervisor.

See below for pictures of the girls in class and graduation.

Listening to the head chef.

After one month of hard work, the certificates mean everything.

Following this, the girls will have a chance to do another cooking course to further improve on their skills and hopefully get a better job in future.

Riverkids Snippets - mini Photo Essay

Evening exercises

Every Monday and Wednesday, the social worker leads the Get Ready Girls in a session of evening exercises.

Trains go Choo Choo!

Children from Steven's House playing with a wooden train set at the Alexandra Family House during snack time.

Get Ready! Football

Once a week, the Get Ready! Girls get a chance to go on a mini field trip, This can be a trip to the library, or to the Olympic Stadium to play 'football' or to the park near the riverside to play some games.

I joined them for a trip to the Olympic Stadium when I was up in Phnom Penh in Jan. Actually I was at the Alexandra Family House talking to Sofia and the others and saw 2 very crowded tuk tuks full of Get Ready! girls and asked Pheakdey to let me tag along. How can I miss out a chance to sit on a tiny tuk tuk with 9 other people cramped in it?

Half the Get Ready! Girls and Pheakdey posing for pictures in front of the stadium. The other half were lost in another entrance of the stadium on their tuk tuk with the kindergarten teacher, Thida. Pheakdey ran off to find them soon after.

The girls went straight to action, kicking their flip flops off and playing their own version of 'football'

Now that EVERYONE's arrived, Pheakdey goes ahead and briefs the girls.

Two lines, two teams.

Football - no rules apply here.

After the games, we went up to the top of the Olympic Stadium to take in the view.

Bright Girl's Rewards

The Bright Girls are a trio of graduated Get Ready! girls who are now practising to make little girl dresses and dolls. After graduation in mid-Nov, they've been busy practising their sewing skills and we, the Singapore Office on our part have been displaying the dresses for sale during fairs. Money raised from the sales goes back to them and the Microfinance Dept, hence creating a revolving loan where funds get replenished. And yes, the dresses will be put up on Shopify soonest! The Girls are also given a monthly salary from Riverkids Foundation til the time their kiddy clothing empire takes off.

Here's a little write up by Sok Lee on the day the girls first got their salaries from RKF. Very touching:

What an emotional day it was!

On the 25 of December, it was the first time in life that our get-ready graduates got their salary from doing the embroidery work. Everyone was excited and proud of themselves when they could earn money to support themselves as well as their family. They almost burst into tears with pride blowing in their mind and here their hard work so far has paid of.

However, what made us want to cry with high emotion was when we saw one of our graduates giving some of her little money she made to her father. Both the father and the daughter were emotionally excited.

“Never ever have I expected to see this thing happen. Thank you Riverkids that creates this wonderful day for my daughter and my whole family”, said her father with tears dropping over his cheeks. Two of them cried and hugged one another with hope in their future life. We, Riverkids staff, wholeheartedly shared this feeling with them too.

At the end of the day, our hard-work was paid which is a high motivation for us to keep working hard and contribute to community development as much as we can.

Get Ready! girls at Hosea

3 of the graduated Get Ready! Girls will be starting a small business of their own selling handmade little girls' clothes and accessories.

To hone their entrepreneurship skills, they took part at a Family Day fair at Hosea, a NGO in Phnom Penh on 11 Dec.

the Riverkids booth.

Showing off their dresses!

Preakdey , the Education Coordinator posing with the cigarette wrapper necklaces.

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.

Quick list update!

• We are gearing up for the first graduation of our Get Ready girls on 15 November. Parents are invited, certificates printed and best of all, we have already found a job for one girl, a business plan for three more, two back at high school and the rest being sorted out!
  
  
• The Hosea consultation has been gruelling and eye-opening. We are doing great operationally, but because we've grown so fast and organically, we don't have systematic structures for decision making and planning. Basically, we need to record down what we're doing so someone else can step in and takeover if needed, and we need to clearly link projects back to child trafficking and put in more monitoring/status reports. Doing it now will save us a lot of time later, and it is pretty simple. I have learnt what a logframe is!
  
  
• All our finances are now going to an external accountant, and we will get January-September's records first, then quarterly detailed statements. Huge relief as it was the most painful part to do because I had to triple-check everything. Now I can concentrate on checking Cambodia accounts to reality and have all the spreadsheety parts done much faster.
  
  
• I am really happy with our spending in Cambodia so far. We need to bite the bullet and hire more social workers, someone to do paperwork only, but all our new expenses - like the weekly boarding house - have been covered by specific donations. We're keeping at our costs.
  
  
• We were very lucky to negotiate rent with the landlord of our current Family House for the house adjoining that they also owned. This is going to be where the weekly boarding and Get Ready classes take place because there's way more room and privacy. The teenage girls boarding will have their own room to share! Also it's got a really nice big kitchen for us to prepare meals and add cooking lessons on. The RJC students going up are going to do up the boarding rooms so the kids feel comfortable and welcome, and help us add boards and posters for visitors to explain what's happening.
  
  
• We have met with several different NGO groups over the past two months, and in every case, people have been WONDERFUL. There are 'turf' problems when your work overlaps or you disagree on methods, but overall, in the past seven years in Cambodia, I've found the vast majority of people working in aid to be open about sharing ideas, resources and advice. We could not have gone this far without so much help. I hope we can be as helpful for other groups. Part of this might be that we usually work only with ground-level staff and small groups *g* like us!
  
  
• The two most likely new sites have been identified and this trip, we'll be firming up plans and a timetable for opening.
  
  
• Volunteers! Karen's interviews will form the basis of our microfinance, starting with three girls and about four adults. Then we have a sewing workshop group in December, more tentatively planned after, football and field trips, volunteers locally for the Riverkids shop and more. A Swedish lawyer is coming for three months to help train and put in a better child and family case management system. I met with a couple who volunteered recently and the best part was hearing their ideas for further work and suggestions.
  
  
• In Singapore, we've been selling Riverkids Shop at local fairs with a good response. We've sold close to US$5000 at them, and we're looking forward to a busy holiday season. DHL have given us great rates for express shipping, so this year, please shop with us!
  
  
• That's all I can remember right now. I leave on Wednesday for the graduation and some big meetings, and maybe this time I'll be awake enough at the end of the day to post!
  

The Get Ready programme video

Or watch it at YouTube. Huge thanks to Jimmy Yap, one of our trustees, for filming and editing.

Edunotice by Jolene Erhardt

A little Leaving Note:

Unfortunately my time in Cambodia is up as well as my contract with RiverKids Foundation. My connection to the children and staff is not over though as I will continue to keep in touch through email. I have told the students it is their challenge to become computer literate. Many of our Get Ready graduates will have computer training as part of their next training step. I look forward to their emails.

The students and staff have become my family and I will think of each student each day, forever. Especially the Get Ready Girls who I have worked most closely with.

The last few weeks I have been finishing off the Life Skills Text Book, its about a 300 page document that includes my own lesson plans, worksheets and activities as well as accumulated lesson plans and activities from other NGO life skills programs. I am leaving with a feeling of accomplishment and security knowing the current Get Ready class and the future classes will have a good program and some awesome role model teachers to facilitate and adapt it. (Also, hopefully edit my grammar)

I want to thank everyone at RiverKids, the staff the students and all the volunteers I have worked with. You have given me the most wonderful experiences and I have learned a lot from you. I will miss seeing everyone’s smile each day but I look forward to hearing about all the successes in the future. I love all of you very much.

Thanks so much

Jolene Erhardt, Education Coordinator

Photos coming!

Several happy bits of news! We held a workshop for interested parents of Riverkids children to teach them how to fold roses and other flowers using locally available papers. The most beautiful were with this heavy soft mulberry-like paper, shown above. We've worked out several low-skill time-intensive handcrafts that will produce gorgeous Christmas things. Well, roses aren't very Christmassy, but they are lovely and light, so easy to post! and always good as a gift - ooh, I could offer them as add-ons to the silk scarves, so you send someone a scarf with three roses tucked inside.

Someone anonymously donated seven digital cameras to us! We've got one in Cambodia being shared by the staff, and now we have a net connection at the office, you can expect lots more photos. We're hoping to get the kids and teenagers taking photographs themselves and to start documenting their lives themselves.

And if you're in Singapore, swing by SMU near the Mt Faber Tunnel and see Riverkids at the Substation Tunnel Party! It's part of the SeptFest and we will be hanging out with punk music, arts and social causes and a lot of people! There will be evening yoga and short films and lots of high-falutin' art things! A group of RJC volunteers will be pitching in, so come by from 4pm to 11pm!