Wednesday 21 December 2011

IU Dental Clinic Report

Over the past three months the IU Dental Clinic has seen over 508 of children from 17 different orphanages and NGOs all over Phnom Penh. Many of the children came from Steung Mean Chay – an incredibly poor community where families live in slum conditions next to Phnom Penh’s old municipal dump site. For the majority of these children, it is the first time they have received any dental care. All of this work is funded by CamKids.

As you can imagine, many of the children have very significant dental problems. At the initial examination, most children are listed as having ‘poor oral hygiene’ and their problems include cavities, tooth pain, abscess, bleeding gums and gum disease. The IU team has been able to provide a wide range of treatments including: extraction, filling, scaling, root canal treatment, fissure sealants and topical fluoride. For a few, they have also been able to provide surgery (usually for impacted painful wisdom teeth), crowns and partial dentures.

The aim of the IU staff is not only to treat the children’s immediate problems, but to educate them on how to look after their teeth. The students training with the IU Dental Clinic take turns each day at giving oral health education to groups of children. There is a section of the clinic with mirrors and basins where children can be taken to have supervised tooth brushing. Each child is given a free toothbrush after their visit.

A few of the older children have severe cavities in their permanent teeth. It is often a difficult decision whether to extract, or try to save the tooth with costly root canal treatment and a large filling or crown. Where this involves the front teeth, the IU team does as much as it can to save these teeth so that the children can have a nice smile. Rotten or missing front teeth can place the child or adolescent at a lifelong disadvantage, as well as impacting on their self esteem, ability to make friends or get a job later.

One of the IU’s patients is 15 year old Dalin. Dalin sadly lost her parents due to HIV/AIDS when she was 8 and moved in with her aunt at the Steung Mean Chay dump site, living in extremely poor circumstances. Dalin is currently in grade 8 and aspires to become a medical doctor so she tries to study hard.

Dalin was brought to the IU Dental Clinic for treatment because she had toothache, an abscess and significant fractures to her front teeth. Treatments and oral health education were given by IU dental students and after treatment, she was ecstatic with the result. The opportunity to receive such treatment and care for the first time in her life left Dalin feeling extremely fortunate and grateful to all those who made it possible.

Your support means that we can not only treat hundreds of children and free them from pain but provide valuable practical training for the students of the IU clinic.

If you are are interested in finding out how you can help children like Dalin, please email us or make an one-off online donation here or a regular donation here.

Monday 12 December 2011

CamKids Winter 2011 Newsletter

CamKids In The Community

Strangely, it remains a common misconception that CamKids' work is confined to one orphanage, as we still get asked the question “How is the orphanage going?”. The fact is, we do support 4 children’s centres, to varying degrees and in different ways, but we also do a vast amount of work in the wider community, supporting programs to help keep vulnerable families and communities together, as well as our increasing education and medical programs. We thought, with Christmas approaching, the theme of our newsletter should be “Save the Family. “

One of the major criticisms of orphanages in Cambodia is that the majority of children have some sort of parentage - they are economic orphans. This is not a situation unique to Cambodia but it is a very real problem. With little infrastructure and no help for poor families, it is a viable and sometimes the only option for parents, single parents or extended family, to put their children into orphanages and children's centres to give them the opportunity of an education, healthcare and even the most basic of needs - food.

It is a driving ambition of CamKids to not only help those centres that already exist, but to help lessen the desire for families to look for alternative living arrangements for their children, by providing, or at least, helping to provide their communities with facilities and opportunities for those families to stay together as a unit. A nice sentiment, but how, with your help, do we make this a reality?

In this edition of our newsletter are practical examples of how this is happening, how it can continue to happen and who is helping in the pursuit of these goals.

WE NEED YOUR HELP
In order to fund our the projects shown in this Newsletter, we need to raise £20,000 to build the CC School, £5,000 for Raing Te Kindergarten and a further £5,000 for furniture, equipment and setting up costs.

£15 will pay for a solar light for family use at night, £30 will pay for a desk and bench for the school, £300 will fund the cost of digging a well and £400 will pay for solar equipment to give the school light at night for evening classes.

If you would like to make a donation to help fund these great projects please go to:

Regular payments are our life blood and enable us to commit to supporting programmes like this for the long term. If you feel able to commit to a regular donation to CamKids, the following is a guide to how far your money will go:

£10 a month will pay for School Supplies and Consumables
£20 a month will pay for a Junior Teacher’s Salary
£30 a month will pay for a Teacher’s Salary
£100 a month will pay for all the School’s Running Costs

Please go to:

to make a regular donation or e-mail finance@camkids.org to find out other ways of making a tax-deductible donation in the UK, US or Australia.


To access the Newsletter, please click Here or Contact Us and we will send you a copy by e-mail. If you sign up to our Newsletter below, you will receive future copies by e-mail every 6 months (your details will not be used for commercial or any other purpose).

Thank you once again to all of our donors and supporters, without whom none of this would have been possible. If you would like to find out how to support our work, please Contact Us.

The CamKids Trustees

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Wednesday 7 December 2011

Spend and Raise Money For CamKids With Give As You Live