CamKids Funded Building at New Futures Organisation

The following report was received from the director of New Futures Organisation ("NFO"), which is based in Takeo and supported by CamKids. This is one of a number of projects which CamKids has funded at NFO and we will be reporting on more of the projects in the coming weeks.

What happens if you get the fantastic assistance and support from a sensible and knowledgeable funding organisation like CamKids and add it to a wonderful staff team, a group of willing volunteers and 52 kids eager to learn and improve their futures.

Well, in our case, we ended up with a fantastic new education centre that will cover all of our needs for the coming years.

CamKids provided funds and advice, we supplied a willing team construction team and local knowledge, and built in a traditional building style a building which houses the following:-

Multi Purpose Room
A large room which can be used as:

• A classroom (complete with furniture built in the workshop mentioned below) which can hold a class of up to 65 children;
• An activities room for arts and crafts, board games, doing homework etc;
• A TV lounge or for watching on social evenings; or
• A home for the largest Lego set in Cambodia.

Library
A room to house our growing library of book, games, DVDs and a small group of old computers which the children learn computer skills on.

A Beauty Room
This is a room in which we teach hairdressing, beauty, nail care. This has two purposes - firstly to teach the girls life skills and secondly to provide vocational training which may develop into a employable skill at a later date.

A Dressmaking room
This is a room in which we teach dressmaking. Once again to provide life skills and vocational training to help the older children find employment, when they leave the orphanage.

A workshop
This is a fully fitted metal and woodworking facility, designed to enable us to carry out most repairs and maintenance on the premises and equipment. We also manufacture our own furniture needed for the orphanage, and our village schools. This is also the room in which we teach DIY skills, once again for life skills and vocational training (we will be posting a separate news entry on this shortly).

You must be thinking all of this must have cost a king's ransom - but you would be wrong!

Because of the commonsense approach of CamKids to funding, the entire project only cost $3,200 (or just over £2,000). Quite an achievement in this day and age of rising costs and is a wonderful and sensible use of donors contributions.

A big thank you to all of our donors and supporters for making this possible. If you would like to find out more about CamKids or our projects at NFO, please send an email to contact@camkids.org.

Mobile Dental Unit

The following is a report from a recent trip to Kampong Chhnang from 11th to 15th January 2010 by the One-2-One NGO in Cambodia, which provides free dental and medical treatment to poor children and their families. In addition to donating funds to One-2-One for their general work, CamKids is funding the cost of a mobile dental unit to perform regular visits to outlying areas of Cambodia, where the population is too poor, even to travel to the free clinic in Phnom Penh.

During this trip, 351 patients were seen in total, of which 206 were age 18 and under. 201 extractions and 195 fillings took place and 51 scalings were carried out. We had 2-5 dentist for the 5 days and our numbers were boosted towards the afternoon with a dentist coming over from the prison service to help . During this time 1 dentist was unwell for 1 day but recovered after that to continue the excellent work.

The mobile clinic took place in the local community facilities, and community leaders also helped us find the pockets of the most needy children. The team went in high spirits - all keen to help and make a difference. Everyone had a job to do - registration, dental education, treatment, worming, nits treatment, sterilizing of equipment.

Even though, for many, this was the first time they had met a dentist, they were amazingly brave and coped extremely well. We also provided health education for the children - giving tooth brushes and tooth paste and teaching them how to use them.

We also had a great nit busters team, applying shampoo waiting the appropriate time and then off to rinse and dry and a great team out at the back doing the cleaning and sterilizing.

Thank you again to CamKids and all of your donors and supporters for making this possible.


Please also check out the slideshow of the trip below. If you would like to help us fund this fantastic project, please contact: medical@camkids.org or make a single or regular donation from our website and mark the project 'Dental'. Payment can also be made online from the link in the sidebar on the right of our Weblog or HERE.

Rumdoul School Visit by CamKids Supporters

The following report was recently received from one of our longest running supporters, following his visit to Rumdoul Thmei School, which was acquired and is funded entirely by CamKids, with the help of Mark & Lynne and their extended family and other donors:

In mid December my wife, Lynne, son Harley and I were able to combine a cycle trip through Western Cambodia with the chance to see first hand some of the work that CamKids is funding. After a week on the bikes we met up with 2 of the CamKids Trustees, Dom and Benita Sharpe, in Phnom Penh. We had been in contact via email for a number of weeks so it was great to finally put faces to the names and catch up on all the current projects they are overseeing in and around the capital, during their year long stay in Cambodia, en route to Australia.

We headed south for a day to Kais Village Orphanage and then on the school at Rumdoul Thmei. The staff and kids at Kais were very welcoming and only too willing to show us around. We spent most of our time in the new nursery, with any number of kids toddling up to us to be picked up and carried around. We also checked out the mango orchard and Dom’s pride and joy - the methane collector from the pig sty that helps fuel the stoves in the kitchen – pure genius we reckon! The compact little medical centre was also very impressive. It was a wonderful visit, made all the more touching by the warm welcome that everyone gave us.

The Rumdoul Thmei school has been important to our extended family for the past three years. After our friend, Amber Murray, got us involved in CamKids we got together and decided that since we have a number of teachers in the family we would like to support a school. At the time, Rumdoul was just starting up so everything fell into place. Our visit in December was therefore very special to us. On the first afternoon we met the staff and some of the students, but many had gone home for the day. So we returned the next morning and were introduced to each class. It was both inspiring and thought provoking to see the amount of work that had been done to establish the school in such a short space of time but also to realise how rudimentary the facilities were and how much better resourced they could be. What was most obvious though was the the great enthusiasm the kids had for learning and how excited they were to be given the opportunity. I wish that every class I taught back in my well resourced school in Australia was filled with the same thirst for knowledge and sheer exuberance we saw in faces of the children at Rumdoul.

We would very much like to thank Benita and Dom for taking time out of their heavy schedule to take us to visit these two projects. And we urge everyone to continue to give generously to support Camkids. To see the work they are doing first hand was a privilege and an experience that our family will never forget.

MARK SMITH

If you would like to support this or any of our other education projects, please send an email to schools@camkids.org.

CamKids Medical Update

CamKids is very pleased to report that the medical hut, built by volunteers in 2006, still has a doctor visiting every week and the general health of the children is unrecognisable from the situation 3 years ago.

As well as paying for the doctor's visit, CamKids covers the cost of necessary medicines and is now paying for a full time nurse to live on site. This will help in the training of the nannies, day to day medical care and aiding the doctor with his visits as well as on going treatment and observation.

Each visit, the doctor sees all the babies and toddlers and all children now have well documented and up to date medical records. Babies are weighed at regular intervals to check growth and development. The doctor also spends half an hour every visit, instructing the nannies on basic first aid and hygiene. CamKids is proud to be able to continue to support such a worthwhile project.

We have been expanding our medical programs to reach more children and details of these projects will follow shortly. However, as we expand such projects (where the benefits to children are obvious and undeniable) our costs also grow. If you feel you could help in any way, please contact medical@camkids.org or make a donation HERE (please insert 'Medical', as the project).

In the slide show below you will see the doctor and the nurse, as well as a number of nannies and the children being treated.