Newsletter 19

Chanti made a comment to me a little while ago along the lines of "how can we teach the children about hygiene issues when some of them literally only have one set of clothes to wear".  Day in day out, night and day - the same set of clothes....  Can you imagine it?

Thanks to Koren, a young lady from Adelaide, who single-handedly raised a very considerable sum of money for us, we recently bought each of our students two uniforms consisting of two tops and two bottoms.  (And we had a lot of change left over from Koren's donation.)

Koren also spent a month volunteering at the school and helping to teach our English classes.

If there was ever a case of pictures telling a thousand words, then these two are it.  It was a very exciting time for all and we obviously enjoyed giving out the uniforms as much as the children enjoyed receiving them. 

You may wonder why, in this environment, we gave the children white tops?  The reason being because white tops and blue pants or skirts are the official uniform of all Cambodian schools.  Thus, they can wear their uniform to the government school as well.  

Left: Koren looks at a shirt one of our students was wearing to school.

Toothbrushes for all!

As part of our ongoing commitment to try and improve the general health and welfare of our students we also recently gave them all a toothbrush (thanks, Mum, for providing 300 toothbrushes). We spent a day on dental care teaching how and why the children should brush their teeth.  A random sampling of 40 children showed that only 5 owned a toothbrush.  The smiles on the faces of the children as they chose which colour toothbrush they wanted were almost as big as when they got their uniforms.  Such a small thing, that I think I can safely say the majority of us take for granted.

The fact that there is no electricity in our village means that it is very, very dark at night.  Our classes go until 8.00pm in the evening and we used to have to rely on a small and inadequate amount of light from a car battery or a noisy, and expensive to run, generator.  Thanks to Brian (see below) and our many other generous donors, we have now gone high tech and have installed two solar panels on the roof of our school.  Even in the wet season there is more than enough sunshine for us to power 8 lights at the same time, as well as run a tape player, TV, etc.  

As usual, getting the equipment to the school was a challenge, the solar company assuring us they would be able to make it in a tuk tuk (small carriage pulled by a motorbike) despite us trying to warn them about the state of the road.  Well, the tuk tuk driver went as far as he could then we had to hire an ox cart to go the rest of the way.

Mitsubishi's high tech solar equipment being delivered by ox cart. 

Installing the panels on the roof.  The workmen had nothing to protect themselves from the scorching heat or hot tin roof.