Helping Asians Help Themselves
The teachers at the Goducate Literacy Centers in Laguna have embarked on a program to teach hygiene to the students attending these centers. They started with teaching children at the literacy center in Burol, where 33 children were taught how to brush their teeth.
Each child went away with a gift pack that included a toothbrush, toothpaste, a towel, and a piece of soap.
The program will be introduced in turn to the other 4 other literacy centers.
Last week Goducate country representatives, the headquarters team, Goducate partners, Goducate Training Center staff and trainees, and invited guests attended the 4-day Third Goducate Summit, which was held at the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo. The country representatives came from Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Those from Malaysia and Myanmar were unable to be present.
Country representatives as well as project leaders and consultants in specialist areas of work shared their experiences, mistakes, and lessons learnt, while headquarters staff shared dreams for the future, drove home good management and accounting practices, and reminded the audience about internet security. Each day closed with a lively question-and-answer session.
The “real” business, though, was conducted on the day after the summit ended, during focus-group meetings. These were led by project leaders in various areas of work—such as agriculture, livelihood training, sports, music, English teaching, etc. During these sessions, those specially interested in following up such work were able to clarify in greater detail what they wanted to know.
The meeting was a chance for Goducate workers to share ideas about how best to help the needy help themselves in various ways. For the present batch of trainees it was an opportunity to learn about Goducate work in different countries, and to talk face-to-face with the country representatives of places they might like to work in when they finish their training.
Late last year Goducate visited Yangon and Mandalay in Myanmar to see whether we could play a useful part in helping the needy help themselves there. We identified one project in Yangon that we thought was worthwhile and that seemed to need much support. After monitoring the work out there in Yangon and after much deliberation at headquarters, Goducate revisited the team last month and decided to support that work.
Myanmar is opening up, and the ability to communicate well in English will be useful for finding jobs. One line of work that this team is doing is thus to teach English to very poor communities. So far the team is teaching English in four such communities. The teaching facilities are extremely basic, but the classes are much in demand. In some of these communities the classes are attended by both children and adults.
