People are great!

Help from all-over

At our Singapore office, a plain brown box appeared. The invoice was strange, marked down to nearly zero. Puzzled, I checked my email.

I had enquired with a sanitation supplier in Malaysia, Steriline, about ordering Glo-Germ for handwashing lessons. And they replied to say that after checking our website to donate all the supplies we would need for hundreds of kids! Glo-germ gel, powder and the handheld UV light.

It's not just the money we've saved from not having to buy the supplies, but the unasked kindness. I only knew about Glo-Germ because of a safety-engineer who took the time to educate me about community-scale hygiene across cultures and languages with very practical tips.

A visitor next month is bringing masses of prenatal vitamins for us, another NGO offering to pitch in on the translation costs for some of our materials, a retired teacher gathering up all her classroom posters for us....

These people did the most helpful thing possible - they told us what they could do or give best and asked us what we needed from that.

Thank you, Steriline! Now I need to scrub my hands a third time to get the glo-germ gel properly washed off *g*



Sandpit

We had to fix the drains around one of the buildings, and after everything was fixed, the builder had a bunch of sand left over which was set up as a sandpit for the kindergarteners!

We're getting a transparent vinyl cover for night, and setting up a raking and cleaning schedule. This'll probably be the cleanest patch of dirt in the entire slum!

Blog posts

I just wanted to clarify that our blogs are written by several different people. There's me, Dale Edmonds, in Singapore, and in a way, Elaine Meyers who edits many of our reports for us. Then our Cambodia staff write blog entries, and occasionally a foreign volunteer in Phnom Penh will help write and edit the blog posts.

I love having multiple voices on this blog. For some of us, English is a third-language, so do ask if anything isn't clear!