Who Will Children's Village

Who Will Children's Village is situated about an hour and a half North of Phnom Penh City in Kampong Chnang Province. It is home to 45 children at present and CamKids has been working closely with them for over a year now.

There have been some amazing changes and improvements since we got involved with Who Will. The centre now has 4 residential houses with one carer in each of the 3 houses and a husband and wife in the fourth. Listed below are some of the significant developments:

• There is a shaded play area between two of the houses, with swings, monkey bars, a see saw, a balance bar and some tables and benches to sit at and play or chat. These were donated by Lorna Morris, a volunteer who raised money in her home of Jersey and came to volunteer at Who Will for a month. She was the very first volunteer in a programme CamKids helped set up.
  
  
• CamKids donated a new generator and housing shed to Who Will as they are too far away from the electric mains in the village. Lights are only used for three hours each night and at the same time the generator is used to pump water from the well into the water tower. The diesel cost for this is approx $500 - $600 per month which is a huge cost, but at the moment there is no alternative.
  

• CamKids funded a new 8 metre deep open well which now provides good quality water for the houses.
  
  
• The construction of a new football pitch (including leach field), was donated by Chris and Silje’s fundraising efforts in the UK. We are just waiting for the long overdue first rain, before sewing the grass. Chris and Silje emailed CamKids, asking if we had any projects they could help with whilst in Cambodia. They volunteered at Who Will for three months and among other things, ran English classes for the children, implementing some fantastic phonics teaching.


• As the land floods in the wet season, a large fishpond has been dug and the land used to infill the affected areas. Fish will be going in to the pond next week!


• A new schoolhouse and office has just been completed on the raised land. This was made possible by a very generous donation of $25,000 to CamKids and $5,000 from the Sakka Foundation(a Hong Kong based charity and good friends of CamKids).
  
  
• A volunteer house and volunteer programme are now in place.

All in all a very successful and busy year for Who Will Children's Village. As well as financing capital projects at Who Will, CamKids gives ongoing support to through our sponsorship of a house and incorporating Who Will into our child sponsorship program. You will see more about some of the above mentioned projects on our news weblog soon.

NFO Workshop

As referred to in a previous post, we have included an update on the Workshop Project at New Futures organisation ("NFO"), prepared by the director of the organisation. The Workshop forms part of NFO's educational and vocational training centre building, which CamKids funded.

Thanks to CamKids, all the pieces of the jigsaw have come together to make a fantastic result. It all started with a donation for CamKids to enable us to buy a selection of hand and power tools with which could:

• Carry out much needed basic maintenance work around the orphanage

• be used to provide some vocational training for the kids in 'do-it-yourself' skills, which will be very useful when they have their own homes or some might even be able to use the skills to gain employment when they are adults

However, with CamKids' continued support and inspiration for this project, we have ended up with much more than a set of tools. We now have a fully functional workshop and vocational training area, in which we can do all of the above and much more. We can do just about anything within our workshop and are almost self sufficient in most things we need to repair or even manufacture around the orphanage.

Just to give you an idea, I have outlined below a few of our achievements over the past few months. Please remember that, on top of the physical achievement, most of our children have been involved in the vocational learning process while this work has been carried out and the skills they have gained is incredible.

From the little ones with their “not so delicate painting skills" to the older ones who can now measure, design, select materials and build most of the furniture needed by the orphanage and are even producing tables and seats for local village schools. You should have seen the girls when they helped design , convert, and pimp up our economical fleet (well 3) of "Tuk Tuks", which we use for our local transport (more on this in a later post).

Achievements

• We used the tools to construct our new educational and vocational training building. The workshop is based inside that building with other vocational training rooms and a classroom (materials funded by CamKids, building by volunteers and the children)

• Conversion of rusty old Tuk Tuks into the most reliable, eye catching run-abouts in town

• The construction (helped by a team of volunteers from Hong Kong) of a fantastic new adventure playground


• The manufacture of all tables, seats, shelving and other furniture needed by the orphanage


• The manufacture of over 50 tables and seats for a CamKids funded Village school, enabling 183 kids to be able to sit down and attend school for the very first time (out of a total over over 1,000 children, which CamKids provides funding for us to educate)

I think that you will agree that it is astounding how a project can grow and help so many people.

Thank you CamKids and thank you to all of your donors and supporters.

If you are thinking about travelling to Cambodia and would like to volunteer at NFO for a few days or even a few months, please send an email to NFO.