Author: Grace

Agriculture is part of the livelihood training given to the children at the Goducate Children’s Home in Cambodia. A few years ago the Home started raising livestock, and last year it started the vermicast project that gets compost from earthworms. In February this year, the Home started to raise ducks.

We started with 50 ducklings, and some of the older boys in the Home were trained and assigned to feed the ducks and harvest the eggs.

Initially the ducks were fed on rice husks only. They started producing eggs in the second month but the harvest was only 3-5 eggs a day. So in April we began to give them commercial feeds. Since June we have been more than 500 eggs a month, enough to meet the needs of the home.

The boys from the Goducate Children’s Home in Cambodia spent 2 days and 1 night at a sports fest taking part in a soccer league organized by the Rawlings Foundation and held at the Rawlings Institute soccer field, an hour’s drive away from the Home.

The Goducate Children’s Home sits on about 7 hectares of land, and among the facilities there is a sports area with a junior soccer field. Kicking a ball around is one of the boys’ favourite leisure activities. There is no formal soccer training. The boys pick up the game playing among themselves and with the staff.

There were 9 other teams from different parts of Cambodia in the league. Prizes were given for the first 2 teams, but all went back with a consolation prize for participating in the league.

People in third-world countries have their own creative ways of survival, and the children at the Goducate Children’s Home in Cambodia have been introduced to one of these. The Home was privileged to have been visited towards the end of last year by a remarkable woman, Mrs Purita Tabanao, an agriculturist by profession, who had been involved both in the government sector and later in a non-governmental organization’s community-development efforts in the Philippines, in Cebu province as well as in several places in Mindanao.

In her more than 30 years of experience, she found that an easy way of earning some extra income is to plant orchids and other ornamental plants for sale. All it needs is some extra time every morning for watering the plants, and some extra time at the weekends for propagating them.

During her stay at the Goducate Children’s Home, she taught the children a novel way of growing orchids for sale. The orchids are not grown in containers. Instead they are mounted on pieces of wood, a method suitable for humid climates. The bark is removed from pieces of wood, which is left to dry for a week. Then the cuttings are tied to the wood with thin strips of stocking material and sprayed with water morning and evening. The ties are removed when the cuttings have grown into the wood.

This method costs us nothing. We had a few dozen pots of orchids growing near the staff house, mainly as gifts for visitors, so cuttings could be obtained from these plants. The small pieces of wood are available from the grounds of the Home, and the larger ones from nearby mountains. The plants are generally sold whole, together with their mounts. Hotels often rent these ornaments for big functions.

The first flowering is expected in July or August. The project is suitable for both the boys and the girls, who have taken to it enthusiastically, and there is healthy competition to see which dorm’s or orchids will flower best.

We hope to make turn this project into a business in the future.