Riverkids Project

Hagar, a network of NGOs, includes soyamilk manufacturing. They set up a proper modern facility to commercially manufacture several varieties of soyamilk, including a super-nutritious one made for malnourished children. It's reasonably priced and it costs us about US$180 a month for a daily packet for the forty-plus kids - less than US$5 a month to pack in solid nutrition. Plus the kids love it.

Yup, sophisticated. Basic medical kit - paracetamol, bandaids (lots of them), anti-diarrhea and so on. We had hoped to arrange a fortnightly medical clinic, but the clinic we wanted shut down, so we're still looking around.

These three boys managed to get a full hour of play out of this tiny pile of Lego, building and racing tiny cars - and being very polite about my pathetically bad Lego constructions.

I leaned out the window and took this during an afterschool tuition class. The older kids were playing in other rooms, so not all the chairs are filled. The girl sitting by the door had been naughty, hence the door exile.

IRIS, an eye health NGO, helped arrange and paid for the surgery that fixed this girl's severe squints. She had trouble seeing the blackboard at school, but more than that, she was ashamed of how she looked.

The ones standing and pulling monkey-faces are of course ours. The Kindercare Centre is a one-story house with big airy rooms and lots of kids' art on the walls. It's got that comfortable shabby welcoming feel that I'd like us to reach.

The little kindergarten children with their big smiles and their lovely cheerfulness are so great to see.

The huge new metal boardings mean that no-one can get down directly to the river. You have to take a long detour near the slums and there boats can't moor directly. The land is prime, right near the center of town so it was going to happen, and this time they're making a token effort to recompense the people there.

It was closed by the time I went back, but this is apparently one of the small private schools, teaching in Vietnamese. They don't cost much and they have shorter hours than the state school,but they only go up to Grade 3 or 4.

When it rains, it's pretty horrible in the slum - or just about anywhere that's not paved, which is most of Cambodia. My plastic clogs - Crocs - were awesome but everyone local mocked my total lack of style.

This is a pretty typical slum kitchen - some people will prepare the food on the inside floor, which is about as unhygenic. We have a kids' hygeine training course that our staff will go for soon, and later on another training course in lifeskills so we can start training parents to train other parents, and this is one of the most basic things to start with.

Here we are at work. Me, Lyna and a little girl (the neighbourhood kids came round to see themselves photographed) This is unfortunately, the little shack from which the baby girl was trafficked, but at the time the photo was taken, we thought it was just a simple post-natal check-up to be arranged.

We have some parents approach us, but surprisingly few given the size of the community. These two were hanging out at home, although - shoes and not being particularly little - they don't seem badly off, comparatively.

This is a lot better than getting drunk and gambling, but it's still a slow destruction of lives. Jobs are hard to get if you've got no legal paperwork or education. If you have some capital, you can set up your own business or fish, but most of the men in the community do casual construction work or less than legal work.

This village has been there for a while, tucked down from the riverside, but it's grown a lot in the last two years as the boats have been shoved further and further away by the local authorities. There's no sewage works so it stinks and garbage is everywhere.

The houses are built from scrap mostly, and are almost all one room, with a covered balcony if they've got the space and materials. In April, almost all the shacks had numbers scribbled in blue chalk on their doors - marked for destruction when the slum gets cleared.

It is a really grim place to live in, but when the kids are playing, the river breeze picks up and blows the smell away, there's ripe mango to eat and there's still good things to be had. Good things to hope for.

I spent most of one evening here as I found out about a baby sold in the slum. Five people ended up arrested and the baby was recovered the next morning. I just did the tip and report, and it was really - encouraging and terrifying to see up close what anti-human trafficking requires.

In March, she was hired to help cook the meals when we suddenly had to provide meals for the children after the relocation.

He started out at the bottom of his class when he joined RiverKids, and his most recent report card has him now near the top - 3/37 or 7/33, if I can remember.

Meals are pretty simple - egg, vegetable and rice, and occasionally a bit of meat. The kids eat with pretty decent manners, all in a big circle of plastic chairs.

Each kid has a little mug and a toothbrush (labelled in white-out so they don't get mixed up) and they shower and brush their teeth in the morning, with another tooth brushing before they go. But the sheer NOISE of forty kids split into two bathrooms (upstairs is the girls, downstairs the boys) has to be heard to be believed.

I bought a copy of every Khmer children's book at one of the bigger shops, so there are about forty books there - doesn't look like much, huh>? I hope to add Vietnamese and some very basic english books next trip. But that's more childrens' books in one place than the kids have ever had before. They read them during naptime and playtime.

The kids surprisingly don't fight as much as I'd expected. Part of this is healthy discipline, part of it is that they're not completely relaxed at the center, the way they are at home, so they behave more politely. Choosing books or toys, the worst is a tussle and some shoving.

That is the grand total of our toys - the kids had taken the skipping ropes out already. The toys available locally are pretty much junk, easy to break or battery-hungry monsters. The knock-off Lego is the most popular toy. We hope to do a toy donation drive to fill that basket up!

We couldn't put up much in the way of decorations because we were moving out and landlord restrictions, so we just had cartoon stickers on the wall.