Ever wondered what it is like to be an abandoned child, to see your family split up because a parent is always drunk, to have to pick garbage to help feed the rest of the family? And when “fortunes” change as a child is admitted to a children’s home, what is it like to have to adjust to living with so many others, to keeping some kind of a routine, to having go to classes? What else bothers such a child? What touches him or her? These and many other insights can be gained from “In The Shoes of a Cambodian Child”, a book consisting of stories by the children at the Goducate Children’s Home in Cambodia.
The idea of this book is to increase awareness of what goes on in the minds of children from dysfunctional families. It is so easy to push thoughts about the poor and needy to the back of one’s mind. We hope that the stories in this book will enable readers to empathize with the children from dysfunctional families and think about helping this and many other disadvantaged groups.
In March this year, Channel News Asia brought two experts from Singapore, violinist Min Lee of Wolfgang Music Studio and director of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music orchestra Wang Ya Hui, to Bay in Laguna Province, The Philippines, to see Goducate’s music project and to suggest what might be done to give the project a boost. This visit was for the first of a two-part programme called Once Upon A Village, which was first screened middle of this year. Min Lee and Wang Ya Hui suggested that 5 of the music students be brought to Singapore for some intensive training and to prepare them for some music exams.
Goducate’s music project was started to attract street kids back into some form of education. The scheme turned out to be so attractive to children and so successful that it has been extended to any child in very poor communities, not just out-of-school kids.
Through music the children have been taught discipline, teamwork, and leadership. Through their musical ability some have got scholarships to go back to school or to continue schooling. The more advanced students have formed two orchestras. The senior orchestra has been invited to play at local functions, which has given the students a chance to earn some pocket money. Students have thus been able to help themselves. And in line with Goducate philosophy they have also been using their ability to help others, because the more advanced students teach the less advanced ones in their own or in neighbouring villages. Currently there are more than 250 students at 12 areas in 7 villages in Laguna province participating in the Goducate music project.
Arrival at Changi Airport, Singapore. L-R: Matthew, Liezl, Melissa, Veronica, Bernard (Goducate orchestra conductor), JaysonWith Sheryl Teo, a producer of Once Upon A Village programme
Preparatory to the trip of their lives, the 5 shortlisted students underwent many sessions of training by Elaine Mallari from the Manila Symphony Orchestra. They finally arrived in Singapore chaperoned by their conductor on Oct 22. Channel News Asia will be filming them while they are here for the second part of the Once Upon A Village programme.
Wolfgang Music Studio had kindly arranged for Asian Cultural Enterprise (ACES) to sponsor the trip for the Goducate musicians.
Elizabeth Poey was, in her own words, “every teacher’s nightmare”. Yet she chose to put herself in that vulnerable position of being a teacher. Fortunately for her, her 36 years in the education service were not nightmarish. In fact her experiences during this time, from being a student teacher to being a teacher, then a vice-principal, and later a principal, gave her lots of treasured memories. Ok, some of the events might have been embarrassing or ego-deflating, but they form treasured memories all the same, and they are recounted in her jolly style in her autobiography This Is I Elizabeth…But Who Cares!
