Riverkids Project

Riverkids soldiered on in November making progress in lots of areas and also facing challenges.

One key goal of Riverkids is to provide its children with education to make them less susceptible to trafficking—through its own schools and centres as well as through Cambodian state schools. Enrollment remained constant—with just over 20 children registered in both Riverkids and state schools in November—but so did absenteeism! Most of these kids come from homes where support and stability are lacking, where day to day survival is more urgent than the long term benefits of education, and so the drop out rate is high. In Riverkids’ state school programme, 15 percent of kids are regularly absent and in Riverkids’ own centres, the level of absenteeism in November stood at 10-20 percent. At Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (PSE), a French non-profit making organization that Riverkids sends its students to, the drop out rate was a startling 60 percent—mainly because PSE is too far to walk to from the Riverkids community and few Riverkids students have any other means of getting around. To solve that problem, getting bicycles for the students would obviously help, and to mitigate the overall issue of absenteeism and dropping out, social workers and education officers visit these children at home as well as at school to give support and encouragement.

Riverkids’ micro business programmes continue to grow. Orders are flowing in for the Get Ready Girls craft business, and the girls are managing to deliver on time and to standard. Small events, like Chad Dai’s annual members’ meeting and visitors coming to Riverkids, generate extra income, while for training the girls are being taught more contemporary design skills. Bright Girls are bringing in money too for themselves in their micro business of sewing school uniforms. The aim now is to join The Artisans’ Association of Cambodia which will allow the girls to receive training and sell their products internationally without incurring taxes or shipping costs.

And other Riverkids’ programmes are coming along nicely. Riverkids started Get Ready Boys, a life training programme for teenage boys similar to Get Ready Girls; and got a new library, stocked full of books and tables and chairs where students can read, draw and write. Dancing remains hugely popular at Riverkids, with more and more students signing up for traditional Khmer dancing and the ever popular break dancing class!

Social workers from Riverkids covered a lot of ground in November, visiting 77 families in Psa Touch, Psa Deuom Kvet, Beoung Saland and Chrov Chang Va villages; and extended formal counselling to 12 other families. Staying in touch with these families and helping them with their various problems keeps them more intact and less likely to resort to trafficking their children as a desperate solution.

Another important form of support that Riverkids extends its kids is daily meals and a nutrition programme. In a community where having good, regular meals is a luxury, being able to provide this is a way of ensuring that the kids keep coming back to Riverkids. Two hundred and eighty-five children benefited from Riverkids’ nutrition programme in November, and 50 children received a daily lunch and 20 more got dinner every evening.

In line with this, Riverkids also gives health and medical support, especially to infants and expectant mothers. Pregnant women receive vitamins and medication and are taught breastfeeding and basic infant care, while the babies get a steady milk supply through the Baby Bellies programme.

Volunteers were not in short supply. Six Cambodia university students offered their services as English teachers and social workers, two French volunteers from I-To-I also helped to teach English, and members of the World Health Organisation came to observe and learn from the Riverkids’ community. A further 33 people visited Riverkids in advocacy tours, and three students from the Royal University of Phnom Penh came to look into making a documentary about Riverkids.

And that sums up another busy month at Riverkids! December looks set to be just as full with plans to further build on what Riverkids is already doing and to improve on things wherever possible.

Monthly Report (Oct 2009)

21 pages, 164kb. Covers all our Cambodia programs in Phnom Penh for October 2009.

Summary

An ongoing goal of Riverkids is to integrate all of its children of school-going age into Cambodian state school. We are proud to report that by Oct 2009, 95 percent of our children were registered for state school, with our education department working to enroll the remaining 5 percent.

Keeping vulnerable children in school is not without its challenges. Dropping out is common and one issue this month was school authorities insisting that children who had dropped out and wanted to re-enroll pay the full registration fee again—something our education officers had to contend with.

Another issue is parents removing their children from school because they want to put their kids to work. To encourage parents to keep their children in school, Riverkids organized a workshop to help parents understand how education can give a child a better future, more stability, better health, higher income and so on, in the long term. About 40 families participated and we hope this will result in more children staying in school consistently.

Beyond academic education, Riverkids’ hip hop dance programme continues to be hugely popular. Hip hop gives the kids a tremendous sense of accomplishment and of being “modern”, which boosts their self-confidence. During the October rains the classes became oversubscribed as the children looked for something fun to do indoors, but the show went on nevertheless.

In fact, on 18 October, 10 Riverkids children took part in a hip hop competition held in Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s garden!

Football too is all the rage, with 47 children in our programme with a Cambodian-Australian football organization that conducts training every Saturday morning.

Our social workers kept in touch with the families under their care in the Psa Touch, Doeunkvet and Railway Road slums, dealing with lack of employment, money, medicine and food but a lot of violence, HIV, sex work and other such problems that are unfortunately typical of these communities.

Near our Railway Road slum, we started a new project to support 27 more families with a parent involved in sex work with the aim of getting their children into a local primary, and have hired a house mother from this community to give support to these kids.

October also saw two advocacy trips from Singapore. From 20-23 October, three filmmakers from Singapore toured the Alexandra community to see Riverkids in action, met with NGOs World Hope and Chap Dai to learn how Riverkids works with partner organizations and walked the slums with the street children to experience some of their life. It is hoped that as these filmmakers gathered their material they also took away with them a better understanding of the lives of vulnerable children in Cambodia and the work of Riverkids. The other advocacy trip comprised a group of two observers who came to learn more about Riverkids and our work.

The micro business programme, which now has 13 girls working on embroidery, 30 women making necklaces, 6 girls sewing uniforms and another 13 girls sewing general items, received an order from Canada worth about US$750 for 1,800 necklaces, earrings and bracelets—marking the success of the programme. In spite of the limitations of the girls and women, they are delivering on this order and training hard to improve on their skills and creativity.

As part of our health education effort, Riverkids ran a programme to educate expectant mothers on the importance of pre-natal and infant health. These women were taught basic hygiene, diet and nutrition, infant care and encouraged to visit their doctors regularly to make sure they were generally well and to check for HIV.

For premature babies of high-risk parents, Riverkids runs a Baby Bellies programme that provides milk, health care and support. In October, however, 5 out of 6 families enrolled in this programme did not show up for their appointments, mainly because their survival hangs so much by a thread that even the few cents they possibly don’t earn by taking the time to get help is something they can’t afford to lose, but also because the Baby Bellies centre is far from Riverkids and costs too much to get to. And, it has been difficult to get these families to practice what our nurses teach them, with many parents simply falling back into old, bad habits.

On top of this were the usual array of administrative and operational duties that had to be dealt with to keep Riverkids running smoothly, and planning for the coming months.

All in all a successful October and we are now gearing up for the year end. Thank you everyone!

Monthly Report in September 2009
46 pages, 950kb. Covers all our Cambodia programs in Phnom Penh for September 2009.

Highlights!

226 children had extra nutrition through healthy snacks and drinks during programmes
115 students were promoted a grade this school year
75 children at Steven House afterschool tuition, several absent from family problems
64 new students registered for the 2009/2010 school year at four Phnom Penh state schools
60 families were visited and counselled this month
57 children at Blum House for afterschool tuition, several absent from family problems and truancy
50 children in our choir, 66 in traditional dancing and 74 for breakdancing!
47 children in the Riverkids football teams
45 families had health counselling and checks
45 children in kindergarten, two absent (measles and truancy)
34 children in English classes, some absent from truancy or difficult schedules
34 children and families received the Food Box weekly support
30 women were employed making paper handcrafts for sale
25 students have to repeat the year, usually because of family problems and truancy
25 new grade school students with parents in sex work were interviewed and selected for our pilot Railway site
18 children were safe in our Weekly Boarding program
17 children required medical attention
15 girls in the Get Ready programme, one withdrawn for family problems
15 women joined a short embroidery contract job
13 children selected for places in our kindergarten
12 girls graduated in September, 7 returning to school, 3 to our Bright Girls co-op, and 2 for apprenticeships
10 pregnant women had prenatal care
9 mothers and 6 children had private counselling for serious family issues
7 children were fostered in the community with our support
6 malnourished babies and toddlers had extra nutrition under the Baby Bellies program
6 girls took part in the Bright Girls sewing co-op
4 youths represented Cambodia (and Riverkids) overseas in Italy for football
3 international volunteers taught English
2 rooms were repainted by volunteers from Singapore and the Get Ready girls
2 advocacy tours visited Riverkids
2 children were left motherless after a traffic accident, with the youngest entering our fostercare temporarily.
1 child entered fostercare due to domestic violence
0 child trafficking incidents!

Challenges:

• Kindergarten teachers have extra responsibilities and need more help

• English classroom is small and crowded
• Blum was flooded during the rains and needed repairs
• Lots and lots of work!
• Getting uniforms and school shoes and sharing supplies around
• Microloan programme that fits the high-risk urban community is needed
• A more private and safe space for counselling is needed
• Families skip appointments or refuse to take part in training and counselling
• Kids in foster care and weekly boarding need extra guidance
• We need internal receipts for expenses that won’t issue receipts like street vendors
• The Bright Girls need two new sewing machines and training in business as they expand

1. A brothel worker rubs my shoulders inexpertly as a cover for our interview in the grubby room. There are brightly-coloured posters of houses and gardens plastered to the walls, and a sheet hung up as a curtain over a window. It’s not her room – they haven’t got places of their own, she explains, they just sleep where they can, because they are always working. Where does she keep her things, I ask. In a plastic bag under one of the other beds, she says. She’s the only single woman working there. The other six women have children, husbands or boyfriends. She keeps 30% of her fee, just over $2 for sex. I slip her $5, our interview rate, out of sight of the brothel owner.
2. At the Vietnamese slum, it was like stepping back eight years to the first slum Riverkids worked in, now demolished: kids running around, laughing and playing, and then suddenly the girls at 11,12 onwards are gone. 25 teenage boys, they reckoned for this community. Seven girls, all working “at night”. The rest are gone.
3. Little girl, 2-3 years old, scowling at me when I tried to make her smile, then turning and running after the other children, laughing. Sold for $50 to another family, then dumped when she turned out HIV positive.
4. A beautiful teal-blue strapless dress with a short bubble skirt and intricate ruching, the singer shyly admitting that she wasn’t sure quite how many dresses she had and then more confidently, about her plans to pay for a tailoring course so she can quit the beer garden. She lost her job as a receptionist when the company closed, but this, she said firmly, is not her future.
5. A small boy with probable cerebral palsy stays with his relatives in the slum. He’s thin and cries out to the Riverkids nurse for milk. After several interviews, what seemed to be neglect turns out to be a family struggling to do the best, turned away by doctors, trying to find food he can manage and a pair of doting cousins carrying him around. We’re helping with leg braces, liquid nutritional supplements and physiotherapy. He holds on tight to the little toy car he’s been given, then waves it at his cousin with delight.
6. Lunch with a young woman from a tiny village in one of the poorest provinces, hoping to start university. She wants to be an architect. Her mother kept her and her sister in school even though they had to go without anything else because her father, who died in 2003, made her promise that the girls would stay in school too, believing that his daughters deserved the same education as his sons. She’s tall for a village girl, tall and loved and volunteering at the local temple, teaching english and so earnest.
7. Stepping carefully across the flooded floor of the one-room to sit on the single bed and talk by a dim fluorescent light to a heavily pregnant thin lady, and watching her eyes flick past us to check on her little girl playing behind us, then to the door where her husband waited patiently for us to finish. A love story – they married young and her husband and her were trying their hardest, but she’d had to quit her job at the garment factory when the fumes made her painfully ill this pregnancy. Her daughter’s hair is streaked from malnutrition.
8. “I had an abortion yesterday,” she said when we are asking the three sex workers we were visiting about contraception. She touched her abdomen gently and then explained that it wasn’t the herbs or medicine, but that she was lucky, an NGO (one I know that does good work) helped her get to the hospital for a D&C. “Why the hospital?” I asked. Because she started bleeding after the police beat her when they had arrested her for prostitution. And she has HIV.
9. The police will take your money, they said. All you earn that night, then your jewelry if you have any. Sometimes they are polite and they pay for the sex. But sometimes they don’t.
10. “What about this girl?” one of the women said later, when we were all standing in a group around the railway, saying goodbye to the women who had talked with us. She pointed to a girl with her hair tucked up, leaning against a woman in her forties in pyjamas. “Has she been to school before? Is she working? What about her family?” A little bit – she can write her name, no, only collecting garbage, just her mother as a sex worker and she has, you know, problems, mental problems. Not the girl, they assured us. She’s a good girl. Can we help her?The staff talked quickly. Thursday, our fourth group of Get Ready girls graduate, and the fifth group starts. We have two places left. If her mother brings her, if the girl wants to -yes. And the food box, so she can study fulltime, yes. Be there on Thursday, we tell her. You can do this, give your daughter a chance.

    And she does come, with her hair clipped back neatly, clean shoes and incredible shyness, to watch 13 girls graduate from the Get Ready program (six back to school, seven to vocational training), and to meet the rest of her new class.

11. The Vietnamese-style coffee at the tourist sex bar is very good. I drink, with a headache from awful taiwanese beer I bought at the beer garden earlier when we talked to the singer, while the tour talks to another bar girl. Her story is practiced, a sob story. She needs money, she has a sick child – there’s something off about it, or maybe it’s just that the women here are even more artificial. The men want to pretend that they’re carefree asian girls, that they sleep with strangers because they genuinely like them, that they enjoy sex for cash. Their english is good, but after the beer garden, where the women relax out of sight of the customers, where they sing for pleasure as well as pay, where it’s Khmer, not a bad copy of a Phuket bar, they look exhausted and harsh.
12. The Vietnamese-style coffee at the “coffeeshop” is terrible. Plastic loungers lined up to face two televisions. All men, drinking a bit, talking. We go in and conversation falters then starts again. My staff – Soklee! – talks to the man sitting near us. He’s a boxer, he comes here in the mornings to relax. They work in the markets, as motodrivers, it’s just a friendly place to drink. We look at the upstairs balcony, shut off almost entirely with wooden panels, at the group of young waitresses bringing the men drinks. Soklee goes to pay the bill, and to ask questions away from the foreigners.The owner, a woman, says oh yes, they’re all cousins that she helps with good jobs waitressing in her shop. Free room and board. She doesn’t know about if they go with customers or not, she tells them not to, but sometimes they don’t listen. She pays them $50 a month too. Where do they come from? The countryside, when she visits her home province, the mothers, they ask her to help find them jobs. The waitresses are dressed in nice clothes, with small jewelry, handphones. She claims they make less than the woman, standing barefoot in her flooded slum room, ever did at her 12-hour 7-day garment factory job did. None of them look related. The men look away, embarrassed.
13. But it’s like a pub in a developed country, isn’t it? There are sex workers everywhere. But choice – when you choose to become a sex worker, when you could change to a job that paid as much, that had the same hours so you could take care of your children and feed them, rather than hoping you might have family, a husband (gone, they say, over and over, gone. Another woman, to work somewhere, he beat me, he ran away, he died maybe. Gone.) A husband, a father means the difference between your children surviving or selling yourself to strangers – and someone asks me, puzzled, why do the women want children with their husbands? why do they let their husbands beat them, be so cruel? Because here, a bad husband is still so much better than no husband, than despair.
14. We look at fat babies, nursed and talk about breastfeeding and slings, and why Cambodian women don’t scream when they give birth. Some do, the women say at last, our nurse included, but the doctors and nurses don’t like it usually. They will tell you to be quiet or the baby dies. And you scream, one of the mothers says, what’s the point? It still hurts the same.I try to explain the Khmer code for women, that to be quiet, to never react to pain, is the ideal. I wonder why the code for men is not as widely known.
15. We change at the last minute to visit a different school. We’re annoyed with the school where most of our children go, the one that’s physically closest. The bathrooms have been broken for a long time, and the director admitted that they had the funds to repair it, but they had kept it instead. We offered to repair the bathrooms in exchange for a discount on the unofficial daily school fees for our children, but they’d rather collect more bribes. The school is slowly falling apart, and the last time I saw the senior staff, I counted the number of gold rings on their hands.
16. We visit a school where 24 of our children, older ones that can cross the busy streets between it and their slum home, go for free. The headmaster waived the fees for NGOs, charges a fixed daily fee for the others – I walk in the gate and stop. Painted signs, neatly tended gardens, children running around and playing, but not hitting or screaming. Teachers walking through with children asking them questions, not ducking away. I look into a classroom and gasp – posters, homemade artwork, good schoolwork hung up on display – it’s beautiful, so beautiful.The headmaster, I’m asked – is he rich? He looks rich. I’m puzzled, and then I realise what they mean – he has one ring, a clean pressed shirt, and tidy dark pants. Look at his shoes, I whisper. Sophon had shoes like that once, still does. His shoes are cracked at the side, worn out from use. The shirt is pressed by his wife, his ring modest by local standards.

    I ask who paid for all the improvements, the little fence around the garden for the pet rabbits, the paving stones so the children can play in wet weather, the playground equipment – parents, he says proudly. They saw that we tried to work hard, that we are doing better, and then they give a little, some more. Later, we are talking about a donation from us so we can enroll more students, and he says can the school top up the donation so they can get better quality equipment? I feel like I should pinch myself. Does this school really exist?

17. “She’s just like a limp pillow,” he said. A man complaining to the parents of a 14-year old girl he’d bought in Cambodia that she wasn’t affectionate enough in sex.

Day 1
The first day I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know what to expect or what I would encounter. I had many questions- would the community accept me? Would I really be able to help? I am 17 years old and a high school student volunteering at Riverkids for the first time.

I am considering the medical field for study after graduation so I was keen on working with the nurse to see if this would be a path for me to explore. After arriving by tuk-tuk, I first saw the smiling face of Soklee, one of the Volunteer Coordinators at Riverkids. She welcomed us and spent time explaining more about Riverkids Project and her involvement with the organization. She gave me a tour of the classrooms and I had the opportunity to observe the kids during lessons. My immediate impression was how intelligent the kids were. They were reciting their ABC’s like professionals and could imitate exactly what the English teacher said after hearing the sentence once! Later I was introduced to the director, Sophon, who went over the mission of Riverkids Project and reviewed our agenda for the next few days. I started to relax as I saw that it would be easy to integrate into this ‘family’ right away.

Around mid-morning, I accompanied the nurse during her visit in which she checked up on newborn babies and pregnant women in the neighborhood. The nurse had a patient approach and seemed well accepted by the community. I was warmed by the smiles and gentle gestures of greeting offered upon entering each house. To go through the community, we had to maneuver narrow corridors and even narrower walking planks through which I could see the strewn garbage from many crowded households. Some families had four walls to enclose their living space but others only had two; they were exposed to the elements year round. This gave me a perspective into the families’ lives and I began to appreciate the Riverkids mission even more as I saw the impact through their work.

I was impressed that these nurse visits were a free service offered to the community. The nurse presented valuable information in the form of picture cards that showed indications of an emergency such as premature contractions or preeclampsia. The picture cards also demonstrated procedures in caring for a new born. I was told that the women did not go to the hospital to give birth so this is the only information they had to alert them to the signs of impending complications.

In the afternoon, I visited the Blum site where I aided the nurse in a demonstration to the children on hand washing (which was being taught so the children would not contract H1N1) in preventing contagion. Once again I noticed how sharp these kids were, picking up the vocabulary associated with proper hygiene. Incredible memory!

Day 2
The day commenced early and my first task was to assist the nurse with a nutritional program. The kids were so cute and sweet and eagerly took in all that we taught them on health and nutrition (which consisted of the basic food groups). I was impressed with the way that the staff was always on their toes when teaching the children and coming up with creative approaches to maintain the kids’ attention and interest. I truly saw how the children enjoyed the class because the staff was able to make learning fun. There was a lot of information to retain and, even though the kids didn’t take notes, they remembered the important points presented.

Day 3

Today we arrived early for the excursion to the water park. The air was charged with excitement. Around 40 of us piled into the tuk-tuks with Soklee coordinating the procedure by assigning older kids to the younger ones. There was a range in ages from 7-17 and all had fun. Even with the language barrier were able to communicate and laugh over the silliest things at the water park. Everyone was so open and I felt a kinship with the other teenaged girls, being a teen myself. We swam, splashed, went down the water slide dozens of times, laughed and overall had an amazing time. At the end of the day when we returned to Riverkids, we felt exhausted, yet euphoric. Saying goodbye to everyone was especially difficult as they were all truly wonderful people to meet. I wish I could have stayed longer and I hope to return again.

This short trip taught me that we all have something to offer and that we each have a responsibility to each other. The staff taught me the importance of working together in improving the lives of the kids and their families. The kids taught me that everyone deserves to be accepted and given the chance to learn and improve oneself.

These will be posted out of order, but here’s the very latest! The Cambodia team has been working on making these reports more detailed and structured.

July 2009 was a busy regular month – lots of volunteers, and programs in full-swing. Most programs are going really well, but we’re over stretched in two key areas: after-school tuition, and our social workers’ home visits. We’ve prioritised visiting struggling families, but our aim is to visit all of them. We also don’t have the capacity to offer after-school tuition to all our students, or in some cases, the social workers haven’t been able to get them to attend.

We are able to expand our school program, but we’re going to have to think hard about different ways to reach out to families and kids, while we try to recruit more social workers.

But the best statistic for the month? No child trafficking incidents.

July 2009 Cambodia report, 14.4 MB PDF, 29 pages.

Ms. Teena Ingram and other four visitors visited Riverkids on July 17, 2009. Ms. Teena is a Founder of Blum Project. Her Family and friends support 50 vulnerable children from Riverkids Community along the railway in Phnom Penh to get opportunity for education and better care.

Teena and the visitors were so pleased when they saw the children were studying happily under support from Riverkids. According to her plan, she would like to sponsor other 50 Cambodian kids. So totally the numbers of children are under support from Blum Project will increase up to 100 children.

Riverkids warmly welcomes all donors for charitable donation to provide children with education, and a safe, alternative place to play, grow and learn so that they can grow up and live fulfilling, free of the devastation known to those children who are trafficked.

Your help is very important to our success. With your help, we can enroll more kids, hire teachers. We can fund health care to children and pregnant mothers.

I hope all of you will kindly support Riverkids. Your generosity can help us sustain our mission for the present and future generations of Cambodian kids.

We would like to express our gratefulness to all the volunteers overseas that take their time out to come to Riverkids whether it might be for a week or a month. Their willingness to sacrifice their time to work with us, using their own money and support to be here with us goes a long way.

Each volunteer contributes in many different ways; they bring and introduce different activities and games that the kids have not known of before. The volunteers teach and contribute in English class, computer class and art class. Through these classes, the kids are able to gain a lot of knowledge, physically as well as mentally. Not only do they learn new skills, they are also exposed to a different culture and are able to learn about a different type of interaction.

Though the kids are benefited through the classes, the staffs at Riverkids gain just as much new knowledge as the kids do. They are also able to learn about another culture, each volunteer is a new experience for them. The Staffs are Riverkids faces a different kind of issue and stress every day, and just like any other job, they get worn out. Volunteers who come to Riverkids help take some of their load off for a short while, as well as motivate their staff to continue with their work. For our staff to be able to meet these generous volunteers who are willing to come half way around the world to contribute to the mission of Riverkids is a huge encouragement to all of us.

I remember walking into Riverkids the first time, I saw all of their facial expressions questioning and wondering whom this random little girl is but yet greeted me with a smile filled with excitement. Each volunteer is like a new adventure for each of the kids, their eyes looking at you waiting for the new games you will teach, or simply awaiting for a hand to hold on to.
Once again, both the staffs and the kids at Riverkids are delighted and grateful to have volunteers come and reach into our lives time and time again. Nothing we do or say can repay all the ways you have affected and left a legacy with us.