My new home for a month!

As is the way with travelling, sometimes great opportunities present themselves which cause all current plans to go out of the window. Whilst in Phnom Penh, I was told about a school and orphanage about 7km from the city centre which was looking for volunteers. I decided to check it out for a day, and fell in love with the place and the children. The NGO is called SCAO (Save Poor Children In Asia Organization), and I have been living and working there for the last two weeks, and plan to stay for a month in total.

It is an orphanage and school in which 17 children who are either orphans or from very poor families live and nearly 200 children from the

local area come to learn English. It is run by a Cambodian family and

the father and director Mr Samith is an orphan himself who wants the lives of poor and orphaned children to be different to how his was growing up. The school is very basic, with a dirt floor and tarps for walls but it is a great place and it is helping many Cambodian kids get a leg up out of the poverty they live in. I have been teaching for 4-5 hours per day, everything from ABC to much more complicated grammatical rules. The students range from 3-24 years old, but all have the common goal on bettering their futures by learning English. Behaviour is so much better than children back in England, it’s incredible how enthusiatic they are to learn even though the recources are so limited.

At the centre, there are currently 4 of us volunteers living with the children and family, and getting fed some serious amounts of rice each day (yes, for breakfast, lunch and dinner!!). It feels like such a big family, I’m really glad I heard about the place and had the time to stop and do some teaching.

At the moment SCAO is about to open a second school and community centre further out of Phnom Penh in the countryside. It will reach a further 450 or so children and be a great centre for the local community. All of the projects are supported purely by fundraising, so any donations that any of you could make would be massively appreciated.

If you want to know more and see what the lovely children, school and centre look like, have a look at the facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/SaveChildrenInAsia or the website http://www.savechildreninasia.org/. .