Goducate … Go And Educate! – Page 86 – Helping Asians Help Themselves

2014-01-242014-01-23

Goducate expands work in Singapore with Happy Happy English

A couple of months ago Goducate started We-Chat English, a program aimed at helping migrants integrate into Singapore society. Although aimed largely at migrants, this program of teaching functional English is also open to locals, to help the social integration process.

There is another group of migrants whose needs are different. They work long hours and live in huge dormitory complexes that house thousands of workers and that are generally situated very far from social amenities—for example, in the middle of vast industrial estates. Their daily routine is one of being bussed to work early in the morning and back late in the evening. Some have dinner at their place of work before returning to the dormitory, whereas others get back and start cooking their evening meal. Then it is practically time for bed. On Sundays, they can be bussed into town, or hang around the dorm complexes doing nothing or using the recreational facilities to watch movies or play some type of sport.

In early December there was a riot in town that involved some of these migrant workers, so visits to town have been curtailed for the time being, and dormitory managers have been instructed to provide more programs for the residents. Although Goducate’s mission is to help through education and training, our assessment is that what these workers need for now is entertainment rather than education. Thus, to start off with, we have devised an “edutainment” program called Happy Happy English for them. We will offer more conventional teaching later on.

The program takes them on a “virtual tour” to see some aspects of Singapore. The video is accompanied by people on stage to lead singing and dancing. At certain points in the video, the scene is frozen, and a relevant English phrase is taught, with the audience being encouraged to shout out the phrase with the facilitators who are on stage.

For the launch of this program last Saturday at a dormitory in the far west of Singapore, the workers were taken on a tour of Universal Studios. The program was very well received by the hundreds who came to be “edutained”, especially those workers from the Indian subcontinent. Workers from this region make up about 80% of the dormitory residents. They were only too keen to join in the singing and dancing. If anything, they found the hour-long program too short.

To make the residents feel welcome in Singapore, Goducate volunteers apart from the edutainment team also go along to mingle and chat with the residents before and after the show.

Happy Happy English is transferable and we hope to bring the program to other dormitories.

2014-01-21

Goducate and Water Missions International ink strategic relationship

In the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yolanda, one of the critical needs that surfaced was safe water for the affected persons. When Mr. Jan Daniel, country director of Water Missions International (WMI), communicated his organization’s interest to partner with Goducate in providing safe water to the typhoon-affected households in Western Visayas, this opened the door to more effective community development partnership.

On Jan 17, Goducate and WMI representatives signed the Memorandum of Agreement that defines the strategic relationship between the two organizations. Not only will Goducate monitor the operations of the 17 Living Water Treatment Systems (LWTS) that WMI has installed in Panay and Negros Occidental, but it will also be responsible for transferring the LWTS to more needy communities after the disaster-response period. In addition, the Goducate-trained CDWs will be deployed to areas with LWTS to help the community attain holistic and sustainable development.

Most of the households in Western Visayas are still reliant on untreated spring, rain, or surface water and from personally made dug-outs and tube wells. Results from WMI water analyses showed traces of impurities and presence of the bacterium E coli in some samples taken from community wells and other common drinking sources.

Each LWTS can process untreated water into safe drinking water at the rate of up to 3,000 liters per hour. The system has three big filters for clean water processing and a chlorinator that is able to neutralize any microbial presence in water.

WMI’s headquarters is in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. It operates 10 country programs in South America, Africa, and Asia and has served 49 different countries on 5 different continents. Through the Goducate-WMI partnership, more people suffering from water-borne diseases in rural Philippines will soon have access to clean and safe water.

2014-01-172014-01-23

Goducate makes tents for schools damaged by Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda)

One way by which Goducate is helping the victims of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) that devastated large swathes of the Philippines in November 2013 is to provide temporary shelters for schools in north Panay that were damaged. North Panay is the area near the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo.

There are two approaches to providing these shelters. For classrooms that lost only their roofs, Goducate provides tarpaulins to serve as the roof. We call these “wrap-around tents”. The school teachers and parents put up bamboo and wooden rafters, and Goducate works with the locals to put up the 32×22 ft tarpaulins

When the walls and posts of roofless classrooms are structurally poor, as assessed by the engineering team from the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Goducate provides a “tent school”. The Goducate team has designed the tent schools to provide sufficient ventilation and insulation from the heat.

The Goducate team has been busy at the Goducate Training Center making these tent schools. We are fortunate to have people with the necessary skills to make these tent schools. When the Goducate Training Center was being built, we decided where possible to employ people from the neighboring villages and train them in various construction skills. One of them learnt welding and has since become a contractor for concrete and steel works. His team has been employed to help make the tent school. One tent frame can be made by 3 people in 4 days. The tarpaulin roof and wall are made by a separate team, so the manufacture of a complete tent is finished in 4 days. A tent takes 4 people 1 h to assemble.

Our target for phase 1 of our relief work is 25 units by the end of January. As of Jan 15, we had 5 full tents (which have been assembled on site) and 10 frames. Work will be speeded up in the coming week with more workers on the job.

We will soon be launching the Goducate Tent Schools with a teachers’ appreciation day to commend teachers for their hard work and resilience during the recent crisis.