Guest * – Page 43 – Goducate … Go And Educate!

2013-12-312014-01-02

Reflections on Goducate work in Cambodia

In mid-December, I was part of a team of 5 dentists and 7 other volunteers who went to Cambodia to offer dental treatment to the residents at the Goducate Children’s Home as well as the people in 2 neighboring villages. These impoverished villages are where the staff and the older children from the Home go to teach English and basic health education to the villagers.

The four days we spent at the Home and in these villages were memorable. I was struck by how the work at the Goducate Children’s Home has had a tremendous impact on the lives of the residents. I saw young lives in the process of real transformation in their ability to help themselves and help others. The children there are being equipped with practical skills that will enable them to reach out to their own people in the future. The short interaction we had with some of the older teenagers who acted as our translators gave our team an insight into the substantial value of Goducate’s mission of helping the needy to help themselves

Our work in the neighboring communities showed me the challenges faced by the staff of the Home in reaching out to those communities. The education of kids in such impoverished communities is a significant challenge. At Diamond Farm, one of the rural farming communities that the dental team served, not all children who attend school live close by. Some children walk 2 hours to the school, and during the long rainy season the clay roads leading to the school turn into muddy red tracks that make walking impossible. The ultra-poverty among the adult rural folk and their priority for survival make the task to implement and sustain a very basic set of health habits at community level extremely difficult.

2013-12-202014-06-09

Vermicomposting project gets underway in villages near Goducate Training Center

Goducate believes that backyard gardening is very helpful for poor communities. It gives them a steady supply of food, and the money saved on the vegetables they grow can then be used for something else. And if they plant a variety of vegetables, they can get a supply not just of fibre and vitamins, but also of proteins as well. Good compost is essential for good crops. When African night crawler worms are left to feed on a suitable mixture of vegetable material, they produce such compost.

The trainees at the Goducate Training Center get their practical training in the neighboring villages. They have started a vermicomposting project, whereby one household in each village is given a quantity of worms to start making the compost. Once vermicompost has been made in that pilot household, the trainees will encourage the neighbors to embark on vermicomposting as well. The worms multiply fast (they can double in quantity in a month), so a household can soon be passing on worms to other households. When most of the households are able to make vermicompost, Goducate will introduce organic farming across the communities.

So far the project has been started in 3 villages, in some of which several households are already doing vermicomposting.

Vermibed in blue containers supplied by Goducate Training Center

2013-12-172014-06-09

Goducate Training Center trainees help neighbors

The Goducate Training Center (GTC) in Iloilo trains people to be community development workers — ie, people who go out to needy communities, to identify their needs, and to identify leaders within the community who can lead projects that Goducate sets up to meet needs. The community development workers also have to be very hands-on in the projects they help to set up, and in the kinds of help they offer to individuals.

The trainees get their practical training in the villages around GTC. At the moment they are in 10 of the surrounding villages. The help they offer ranges from chopping up firewood for or giving massages to very old people, to screening for hypertension, to helping children catch up with school work through regular remedial classes, to training people in simple livelihood skills, to agricultural projects such as backyard farming or pig rearing.

One of the livelihood projects was training in massage. In one of the villages 4 people have been trained how to give massages. Another livelihood skill being taught is how to make choco-balls and yema (a Filipino caramel candy made with egg yolks and condensed milk) with moringa (a plant with many nutrients) for sale in schools. The recipe for including moringa in yema is still being tweaked to get the right taste and quality.