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Poor children at the literacy centre; two girls without parents

 “Help, please help! Your younger sister was cooking food by herself”, shouting by the uneasy neighbour who went inside the class to call up the eldest sister.

The two sisters
The two sisters

The eldest sister was 10 years old and attending class in one of our Goducate centers, learning how to read and write. The youngest sister, 5 years old, had been left alone in the house after attending the first period class.

When she went home, she felt very hungry because of not having breakfast earlier so she decided to cook. “She is good in opening the gasoline tank”, said the uneasy neighbour. When she saw the girl cooking through a window, she is very concerned what might happen – “I tried to open the door of their house but it was locked so I kept knocking but the girl don’t want to open it because she’s afraid of me but still the gas tank was open, I was worried it might be the cause of fire!”.

So the eldest sister hurriedly went home and was able to stop the youngest sister. She cooked the food for her sister and went back to the center to learn but this time she brought along her sister who was full now in stomach. “Thanks for the fast response of the concerned mother who lives nearby”, said one neighbor.

I wondered and asked “where are the parents of these two girls?” One mother who was our teacher in our center answered me; these two girls are left by their father who was working in a construction site to earn extra money not just for food but also for the release of his wife who was in jail. In spite of the risks; parents are still willing to let their children go to the center to learn just like the father of these two girls. So our teachers was giving their best also to double their time to educate the children with love so that whatever may happen; these children were able to survive the challenges of life.

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A swampy school in Sabah

During our recent visit to Goducate’s Sabah Literacy Centers, we crossed little rivers, climbed little hills, hiked slippery muddy tracks and “crawled” under a fence to get to the different centers. However, the most memorable visit was to the literacy center that was built on a swamp.

This community had earlier lived at the edge of the swamp (or fairly dry ground) nearer the road. However, as the area along the road was acquired by a developer who started building nice two-storey shop-houses for sale, they were forced to move into the swamp. I am not sure of the details of what happened, but it appears to me that their houses near the road were destroyed – leaving only the stumps on which those houses stood in the past. I was told that their houses were an “eye-sore” and a hindrance to value of the new shop-houses.

As we walked from the main road to the school-house, we passed what appeared like a “ghost town” of house-posts sticking out of the swampy ground. These people had salvaged the rest of their former houses (the walls, floor boards, roofings) and carried all this into the swamp and rebuilt houses right over the swamp. Today, the school-house built by the community stands proudly in the midst of the kampong – right over swampy ground.

The water level under the school-house depends on the tide. As we were walking to the school-house, our guide told us that we were lucky because just an hour before we came the water was about 65 cm deep!

We tried our best to keep our shoes dry by stepping on planks and stones but as we arrived at the school-house to attend the “welcome ceremony” from the eager students, we were ushered to our seats which were placed on the watery ground. For most of us, it was the first time we had sat through a school concert with our shoes in swampy water.

I was so proud of our Goducate students as they “showed off” what they had learned in the past 6 weeks. My heart was rejoicing, in spite of my concern for my “Ecco” shoes that were soaking in swamp water.

Swamp or no swamp, Goducate wants to help Asians help themselves!

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Carrying a precious cargo of text books to Sabah Literacy Centers

On our recent trip to Sabah, the twelve members of our team carried a precious cargo of donated text books for our literacy centers. Each one was assigned to carry the maximum load allowed by the budget airline. These were no ordinary books for recreational reading but were brand new “outdated” editions of text books donated by PanPac Educational publishers of Singapore.

When our Goducate staff opened the bags of books, they were so excited that they spent hours “checking out” the books. The verdict: “This is a treasure. Let’s start a primary school for the kids!”

For the past year and a half, Goducate has been busy getting literacy and numeracy into the kampongs, but it is definitely time to move on to giving the kids more than just literacy and numeracy.

Within 4 days of receiving the books, our staff had submitted a plan to start a Pilot Primary 1 to Primary 3 program for our 1st kampong center. It was a simple plan that involved training the capable local teachers (mostly mothers of the students) to use the text books to teach. The only bottle-neck to this plan is a sufficient supply of textbooks. The total number of children enrolled in Sabah Goducate centers already number over 1000.

Let’s hope that we can get other kind publishers and donors to supply more precious cargo, so that Goducate can help Asians help themselves.