Category: Cambodia

Five dentists volunteered their services and provided a free dental clinic to poor communities in Cambodia in mid-December 2013. One of the areas the dentists were invited to was a military camp in Kampung Spue Cambodia.

The camp is run by General Sok Rumduol, a commander of Samdeck Hun Sen Body Guard unit. The families of the soldiers were also invited to the free dental clinic. For more than 5 hours, the team together with volunteers, worked diligently to serve over 70 patients at the camp.

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.

 

Goducate has been developing a Sing Your English (SYE) program to teach English to children in Indonesia. To test whether the program would be well received in countries where English is hardly heard, we took it to Myanmar in November, where we found that the children (and even their parents) took to the songs, and were soon able to sing them without accompanying music.

As a further test, early this month we tried it out in Cambodia. A group of Singaporeans who went to the Goducate Children’s Home for the opening of the new boys’ dorm brought the program to two of the villages where staff and the older children from the Home go to teach English.

For the children in the villages, the program was entirely different from the conventional type of classes they attend in school. SYE is conducted in a way that allows children to have fun while learning English, and without the stress of having to sit tests and do homework. Accompanying the songs were actions, games, and also prizes. The children enjoyed themselves and could be heard singing on their way home.

Not only that, but a dental team from Singapore that visited the Home and the villages a couple of weeks later found the village kids still singing the songs.