Featured – Page 5 – Goducate … Go And Educate!

2013-11-262013-11-27

Goducate teaches English in Myanmar

Goducate has a Children’s Home in Yangon, Myanmar. The 12 children there come from very poor families and have lost one or both parents, either through death or remarriage. The children attend state schools, where English is not taught. They learn English at the Home, where they also receive help in catching up with their schoolwork if necessary. Knowing English would be a plus-point for them when the time comes for them to be looking for a job..

Goducate also teaches English to the children in four villages in Myanmar. Our workers in Myanmar visit these villages and teach them English through songs and stories.
I went along with a small team from Singapore last week to introduce our Sing Your English (SYE) program to the children Goducate serves in Myanmar. We found that some of the children in the villages do not go to school because they are too poor. In one village we were told that these children were instead working in bottle-washing factories, where the washing is done by hand.

Learning English at the Children's Home — Learning English at the Children’s Home

Learning a song in English in the village

2013-06-18

Goducate offers needy Myanmar children a home

Ten needy children in Myanmar are being cared for in a home supported by Goducate. Two have been orphaned. The other eight are either from single-parent families or have no homes since both parents have remarried. All are poor. Their ages range from 5 to 14.

The children are settling down well into the home’s family environment. They are getting used to their “new parents and siblings”, and the older ones have started to attend public schools.

It is our wish that the children will learn to care for one another and be familiar with the duties assigned to them. The children will have the love and togetherness that eluded them with their natural parents. This in turn will give them the desire and confidence to care for others and eventually become useful and responsible young adults. Home for now is an apartment about an hour’s drive east of Yangon.

Choosing clothes given by Goducate supporters

2013-06-142013-06-18

Goducate brings education to Myanmar village

Goducate has been teaching in a village about one and a half hour’s drive north of Yangon, Myanmar, where the need for such help is great because the children there are unable to go to school. Their parents wake up before sunrise, to work carrying rocks from boats to shore. Finishing at about 5pm, they stagger home to cook and have dinner before soon going to bed to wake early again for the next day’s work. The parents cannot afford the time and money to send their children to school. The children play during the day, casually looked after by a few old grandparents and mothers who are too exhausted to work that day. They eat food prepared early by their mothers or perhaps even leftovers from the previous evening’s dinner.

The children look forward to anything that breaks their daily routine. Thus a very ready audience of about 50 children and their mothers gather within 20 minutes around Goducate’s two workers from Yangon whenever they visit, often unannounced. For our workers, it is a tiring 7 hours round trip by public transport from their home for each visit. But, it is a worthwhile endeavor, for I could see when I was there a couple of weeks ago, how keen the children were to learn. It is not only the children but also the adults who look forward to these simple short visits. The classes are held in the front yard of a kind farmer, who also allows the use of his small bamboo house when weather is bad.

Our two workers intend to provide more regular teaching sessions for the children in the village.