Highlights:
• Kids are doing well
• New social worker hired
• Came in under budget (just, but still!)
• Holiday schedule with field trips, Vietnamese and art lessons set up
• First family day sucessful
• Visit to AFESIP’s shelter

This trip was the hardest and most useful for RiverKids - but also the most boring to read about! So I’ll write up all the interesting stuff first and go into the administrative and organisational details further down.

No photographs this trip because my stupid camera died. I borrowed Lyna’s camera for some but forgot to download them, so I have to wait till she can email them to me.

Kids misbehaving
First off: the kids are flourishing. We have two housemothers now, one Khmer and one Vietnamese, managing up to twenty children at a time. They’ve divided up responsibilitie with one mostly handling the older kids, one mostly handling the younger ones and housework. When I was working late a couple of times, I noticed a big difference in noise and chaos - before it was a lot like my house with children running around and now they’re better behaved and the evenings are more organised.

I went down once to see why they were so quiet, usually a sign of mischief being planned, and discovered they were all showered and changed, sitting at their school desks and colouring in pictures or singing with the housemother.

New social worker
The new social worker, Lim Thea Ny, seems great. He’s Khmer, but was raised in Vietnam and so moves between cultures easily. Lyna and Sophon are drawing up a schedule for monthly visits - our target is at least one visit to each family a month (about 30) and two or more visits to the families in crisis (about 10 more), which will keep him really really busy. We’re hoping he’ll have time as well to do regular counseling with the children who are acting out, but Lyna may have to take that responsibility.

Our first Family Day
Lyna and Sophon organised a Family Day to welcome the parents to the RiverKids house. All thirty-plus families were invited and sixteen sets of parents turned up that Friday. They were shown around the house before snacks and drinks downstairs and a discussion. One major concern they have is over their children’s registered names. Most of our families are ethnic Vietnamese, and they have a range of paperwork. Some have family books and IDs, some have absolutely nothing.

This is pretty complicated as it’s neither legally, politically or ethically straightforward. Cambodian and Vietnamese citizenship requirements are not clearcut for migrant workers, especially for children born to undocumented migrants. The river that runs through the countries creates a geographical link far stronger than borders - which are hotly contested anyway. Right now, we can help individually if there is some existing paperwork, but we’ll need a lot more research and help before we can do something effective for the community.

School holiday schedule
The school holidays arrived. Cambodia’s state schools run November to July, with a long late autumn break and a few short holidays during terms. We’ve got about ten weeks where the kids are attending tuition in the mornings and then on their own afterwards. For the weekly boarders, that meant a long afternoon of playing at the house, but the others ended up either going home early or not turning up.

So instead of disrupting the full-day routine we had going, risking kids being withdrawn gradually to do work around the house or getting into trouble, we’re organising a holiday programme. There will be three field trips to the zoo, water museum and another place still to be chosen - the museum was crossed off the list at the sheer horror of trying to take forty-plus rambunctious kids past antiques….

The holidays is a great time to introduce Vietnamese lessons. The Vietnamese housemother taught kindergarten Vietnamese and will do some fun relaxed classes for the children who opt in. We’ve had a parent withdraw a child because we don’t provide Vietnamese lessons, although Lyna is pretty sceptical whether that was the real reason as the child doesn’t seem to be attending school at all now.

Sophon’s daughter has volunteered to give weekly art lessons, and we have another tentative volunteer for craft activities. We just need one more volunteer for a full week’s schedule.

We are also now looking for another NGO that does sex education for teenagers. If necessary, we’ll come up with a course on our own, but if we can find a Khmer-language course for teenagers that includes practical and moral advice, yay. So far, we’ve just got mild flirting, but some of our kids are 14-15, and their peers are getting informally married and sexually active if trafficked. Cambodia has a pretty strong conservative morality - you’re either very sheltered or promiscuous.

Meditation, no wait, that’s the other word.
Lyna and I have known each other for over five years now, and seen Riverkids grow from an idea to a working reality. In the past four months or so, we started to disagree on how to handle things. Everything was getting much much more complicated quickly, and we weren’t on the same page anymore.

It got very stressful over the past month, and we thought one of us would have to leave the project. But - a mutual friend of ours heard about the situation and offered to mediate, which is part of his day job in Cambodia.

Several hours later, we had 95% of the problems cleared up and we’re both firmly back on the same page and working on the last 5%. It was pretty freaking amazing what a calm gentle third party could do when both sides passionately wanted a working solution.

Other news and kids
Thea Ny was informed by one of our families about a 15-year old girl whose family was trying to sell her to pay for the uncle’s medical expenses. At the time I left, Thea Ny and Lyna had arranged to visit the family who live quite far on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. A couple of hopeful factors - the sale was for a financial emergency, not greed, and the parents were looking for an alternative such as selling equipment. Maybe we can take the girl in and help arrange a microloan.

For tuition, the teachers are moving to a points system for behaviour and using house teams - the kids are in three groups for chores like setting the lunch table - to encourage good behaviour. The teachers are going to start monthly grading as well for class ranks so we can spot the kids in trouble.

Some of the female staff reported minor sexual harassment by two of the male staff. As outlined in our staff policy, we issued a written warning to one, a verbal warning to the other, and it was also good to clarify what was utterly unacceptable (anything aimed at children for example) and what we could work on. Sophon is putting up a poster of the office rules from our staff policy as a reminder.

Visiting AFESIP
On the last day, we went to the AFESIP shelter outside of Phnom Penh. AFESIP is a large NGO with strong Spansih support. It’s headed by a really couragoues abuse survivor and is a prominant anti-trafficking NGO in Cambodia. They get mixed publicity for their frontline work.

Sophon used to work for them, at their in-take shelter where the rescued survivors would go. Depending on how they’re referred, AFESIP can only hold them for a few days to a month. The first shelter focuses on counselling, and then if they choose, the girls can go to this other shelter for vocational and educational training for up to a year before they’re reintegrated to their homes or a new community.

The shelter is just two years old, a big compound with low airy buildings and flowering plants everywhere. The manager explained that she had a passion for gardening. When we arrived, there was a big group of young women laughing and dancing to Khmer pop music - exercise break after training. We looked through the tailoring and sewing training room, the dormitories and the nursery - mothers with children up to the age of 5, after which they go to another shelter near a school for their kids. It was just -

Someone near and dear to me in Cambodia is in the sex trade, and AFESIP hasn’t been able to help her. I looked around and longed desperately for her to be in this safe, kind place and knew it wasn’t possible. Not yet. Because the damage of sex trafficking - of any trafficking - is that the victims stop believing they’re worth anything except money. They’re told they’re slaves until they believe it.

Trust
Setting up a trust is mostly done - the paperwork is ready to file, after several blind alleys that we were adroitly helped with. Again, I’m amazed how lucky we’ve been with help and contacts coming just when we need them. As a trust, we’ll need twice annual meetings at least, annual audits and clear and detailed record keeping, plus it makes RiverKids something that can live without me and stand alone - flourish alone.

We also had dinner with an official from the department that will be processing our NGO registration. We’re looking for a way to avoid paying bribes for this, and because we’re so obviously tiny and straightforward, we should be able to do it. Plus he had some great stories to tell - a lot of Cambodian officials I’ve met have spent time in communist countries, from Cuba, Russia to East Germany.

Paperwork aaaaargh
We have a rough criteria form that I need to layout, plus more paperwork! Always, the paperwork *g*.

On the very last night, I went through the receipts and budget and again, we came in under budget! Scraping in, but hey.

A big unexpected cost was our internet bill. We had broadband connected which was the same price as a phone line connection, and would with Skype, cut a lot of bills down. But all our bandwidth was devoured, most likely by a virus. If we can get this fixed and set-up, we’ll keep it, otherwise we’ll have to go back to using the net cafes on-and-off.

I left with a 77-item to-do list among the three of us, a pile of paperwork and a sense of strong stability.

Thank you
to all the donors and supporters who give these kids a chance

Please help!