Classes are very good and the concrete paths are happening – not to mention, Christmas is coming
Hello again from our remote but heavily populated villages and Schools in the Kamchay Mear District of Prey Veng Province in Cambodia.
Today is December 1st 2019. A lot is happening here so I will post again on Christmas Day – Good things are happening so the day is quite appropriate.
Possibly because of ‘Windows updates’ and/or ‘WordPress updates’, it is currently extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to edit in comments and notes (text) into a string of photos and videos. [on Christmas Day I will use a different technique – photo then text then photo then text so there will be no editing needed.] For today and the several days we’ve been putting this together with very little internet available anyway – I wont start again! ….
…. so, for today only, I’ll list now, all the photos and YouTube videos as they appear below in sequence – so that without notes, you can still make sense of it all. Good luck to both you and me.
The First Sequence of photos and videos.
I had been in Australia for three months fund raising and visiting friends. The first three photos were taken on Magnetic Island. Our fourth School which opened on January 26 this year is named My Health School after Carrie’s International Yoga Company – My Health Yoga. Carrie’s mother Zoe is very much part of it all and in the first three photos you see Carrie recording a video designed for Yoga teachers to teach Yoga to the ELDERLY … yes, the elderly!! Carrie’s class for the video was me and Zoe. My Health Yoga has its own TV Channel ‘My Health Yoga TV’. We are very VERY pleased with all the support our children and teachers receive from My Health Yoga.
Next in the sequence are two photos and a video about our phone campaign. As you might have read in previous posts, we receive donated old phones and in the villages we reset and restore them ready for sale to help support our Schools – the YouTube clip explains what we do and have done.
Scrolling down, you find ten photos and two videos that deal with the network of concrete footpaths that we planned at the time of the August post. Concentrated effort now means that the whole network crisscrossing the Chuor Ph’av campus will be finished before Christmas. It is already looking good and the large area under the bicycle shed is almost complete. It has taken many hundreds of bags of cement but the benefit on the muddy monsoonal days will be huge. –
Donations and how we spend them
The money needed for the concrete pathways was donated specifically for the pathways.
Financial contributions are how we survive, they are why all our children have a School to go to. Our children get choices in life BECAUSE of our schools – before us it was sex slavery.
Any dollar amount is precious to us – if you are interested, please look to the left of your screen and in the index you’ll find the Donate Page which will tell you everything you need to know – some people prefer PayPal and others prefer RAWCS {Rotary Australia World Community Service) . A donation from Australia through RAWCS receives an instant tax deduction receipt. Whichever you might choose, we receive the money very quickly in Cambodia – and we have zero administration fees. We pay zero travel, food and accommodation expenses to me or anyone else. All our workers and teachers are Cambodian people living in our villages. I for example receive no money.
We accept EVERY elementary school age child 4 – 14 years of age – currently 1000 children. At age 14 our children transfer to a nearby public High School; that High School wasn’t available to us until recently but the Cambodian Government has built us a road that connects all our feeder villages to the High School.
We are a publicly owned campus of elementary schools as is the Prey t’Baing School – it’s just that without us, they wouldn’t exist – as you can read elsewhere within this website we have the ‘six poorest villages in Cambodia’ feeding our schools. John
The second sequence of photos and videos
First, the video below.
Kamau is one of our village girls and has her own section under the heading to the left of your screen entitled ‘Village Children’. As you can find in her biography, she married and has a son, Picadeh; Picadeh has been seriously ill for some months. Picadeh has a tumor – it’s impossible to know more. I think that it (or even they) is in or near his kidneys. There is no blood bank of any sort so the family and I pay for blood and his father, although exhausted, gives blood. I am not asking for money. We have no idea of a prognosis or a plan of any sort. An operation would be more exploratory than anything and high risk. In the video, Picadeh looks good; his family is drained. In the video below he is with his Grandmother (Kamau’s mother), Nat. A hospital bed is free, Any medical visit of any sort, medicine and food costs money. If Picadeh’s treatment or condition changes I will let you know.
The next photo after Picadeh’s video is a reminder that the third School built is a distance away (still in Kamchay Mear District) in the village of Prey t’Baing. We’ve concentrated today on the three Schools in the Chuor Ph’av campus of schools – but next year much of our attention will be on a building project at the Prey t’Baing School.
Prey t’Baing School was originally funded by an Australian Travel Company – Captains Choice (who also built our second school in Chuor Pháv) – and then the town of Antibes completely took over ALL ongoing costs from teachers to books and so after a while we renamed the Prey t’Baing School – Antibes School (France). – things happen and French funding dried up but it is still named ‘Antibes School’.
Antibes School is a beautiful three room school with dedicated progressive teachers. They do their office work on a table on the verandah (lots of photos in posts from earlier months.) Plus they have nowhere to store anything at all. We want to build them an office – a stand alone building similar to the pink office in the Chuor Ph’av (pronounced joo pow) campus. The cost is likely to be around US$11.000. If you can help us to raise even the smallest part of that goal – our teachers particularly will be forever grateful. I f you can help financially then go to the Donate page to the left of your screen, work out what you’d like to do and within your secure donation post from that page, please specify what you want the money spent on. Thank you very much – from John
Christmas Spirit and the third sequence of photos and videos
The video above was taken as soon as I arrived at our Guesthouse on November 22nd. The video has nothing to do with any of our actual progress but it does give you a three minutes and 16 seconds look at our dogs, two of the nearby children and a few moments insight into the way I think about unconditional love.
The fourth and final sequence of twelve photos.
It might seem a bit far fetched to to say that all the students and all the teachers in every classroom seem happy and engaged – but they are. {take a look at the photo just above the Christmas tree video of our children running TO School!}
Some of the photos have embedded notes. These are all brand new photos of classes of children.. I walked easily from class to class. The classes are a joy to witness.
Many of you reading this today contribute financially to what you see here. On behalf of all the children, all the teachers and all the families – thank you so much for giving these children, thousands before them and the thousands to come – a chance. John.
