This is Sarah, together with Margaret, who visited the Home for the first time with us a few weeks ago.
When I first interviewed her in Dec 2008, I remembered a nervous girl taking a long, long time to figure out how to respond to the question, “How old are you?”. When we decided to interview the children again during our recent April 2011 trip (without giving them any advance notice to prepare!), Sarah spoke confidently and answered my questions correctly and quickly in English.
Encouraged by her responses, I tested her further and found a rather difficult passage in English for her to read to me. She did so without any difficulty. I also asked her to write her name in English, as well as in Khmer.
The homeschooling program at the Goducate Children’s Home had certainly been successful in helping these kids improve in their studies. Moreover, they are happy, well fed and well cared for by the people who run the Home. Hopefully Sarah and many of these children will grow up into successful adults who can help other Cambodians help themselves.
Goducate representatives usually visit the Goducate Children’s Home at Prey Nob, Cambodia at least four times a year in order to keep abreast of the on-going work there. Our first visit for 2011 coincided with the Khmer New Year week in the middle of April.
During this recent trip, we decided on the spur of the moment to call the children up one by one for an ‘interview’; we do this at least once a year to assess their ability to speak, read and write English.
Goducate volunteer, Margaret, interviewing a child
Many of the children have been at the Home for at least three years, and we are pleased to find that they could now understand simple English. The ones who arrived at the Home a year ago in March 2010, however, still had a long way to go. These newer ones needed an older child as an interpreter. However, we were still pleased to hear them recite the ABCs successfully, as well as count from one to ten in English!
Goducate believes in helping needy Asians help themselves. Therefore, it believes in starting projects that are eventually self-sustaining. The exception to this is when Goducate helps out in emergency situations (eg, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, floods).
Therefore, Goducate Training Center, where future Goducate workers are trained, must set the example of being self-sustaining. This will be a big challenge because it costs a lot of money to maintain an 11 hectare site, with multiple facilities on it. Furthermore, there is the need to feed, house, and train many trainees (hopefully 100 full-time trainees by 2012). We also need to feed about 100 teenagers from poor surrounding villages each weekend who come to the training center for weekend training in lifeskills such as discipline, teamwork, leadership, cultivating good habits, etc. Then there is the need to pay our faculty of agricultural lecturers and trainers, and teachers in English, literacy, computer skills, foreign language, and cross-cultural knowledge.
One way to help is to produce as much of our own food as possible. We have managed to grow high-yield rice that provides all our present rice needs. Our own vegetable gardens and fruit trees can produce most of our vegetable and fruit needs, with some extra for sale. Our impounding pond has an estimated 15,000 tilapia fish—which can provide most of our needs for animal protein.
However, we still need to raise funds to pay for the other expenses mentioned in para 2. We believe that we can raise this by renting out our facilities to corporations, institutions, schools, and even individuals for their special events. For example, a corporation may rent our multipurpose hall and facilities for their training or bonding event, or a university may rent our huts, dipping pools, and activity fields for a special event,
It is much more convenient to rely on donations to maintain the training center, but if we can’t help ourselves, we will not be able to train our workers to help others to help themselves.
All purpose gymnasiumDipping pools for rentRevenue-generating zip-line
This is Sarah, together with Margaret, who visited the Home for the first time with us a few weeks ago.
