Free education for 300 children in rural Cambodia

After the bustling and busy times that the end-of-year always brings, plus the excitement of settling into our new school, things at Helping Hands are now slowly getting into a mellow flow. This has given us time to reflect, process and make room for some very positive changes in the new year!

Final building is done!
We are excited to announce that the last building of our new school is finalized: the new kitchen!

Thanks to our generous donors Saga Charitable Trust Foundation and Brian Kuhl, who  funded the new kitchen build, we now have a wonderful big space for preparing our students' breakfasts. The new kitchen also includes two secure storage rooms, so that we can store valuable school materials! 

2018: Empowerment at full blast
At the beginning of this year, we’ve had to say goodbye to our very much-loved Project Coordinator Nang, who was with us for three years, but has now embarked on new adventures. Although we are very sad to see Nang leave, his departure has made it possible to promote someone else into his role; someone who we believe is more than ready for this amazing opportunity - our very own English Teacher Sopheap! Sopheap, born and raised in the village, started out as Helping Hands’ very first young English teacher with little experience but big determination and eagerness to learn. In the 10 years that followed, Sopheap has grown out into a phenomenal teacher, active community member and he is a born leader, empowering his own and the younger generation to improve their lives in the village. His story is one of the most successful ones in the history of Helping Hands – and he is the perfect person to now finally fill the shoes of coordinating Helping Hands, alongside our Globalteer management team.

Empowering the villagers and building up the dignity of the community as a whole has always been Helping Hands objective and strength. Alongside Sopheap, also Sister Rhi, our gardener, has been able to fulfil a new position. Rhi - who, when starting out at Helping Hands a few years ago - couldn’t read or write and still had lots to learn in farming, has now become literate, grows the most delicious veggies in the region (we believe!;) – all because of her urge to learn, grow and develop – taking on all learning opportunities that Helping Hands could offer her. That is why now, Rhi has proudly taken on the very important responsibility of coordinating our breakfast program.

We are 100% certain that both Rhi and Sopheap will shine in their new roles.

Fun learning is productive learning!
We can all agree - when we are having fun, we learn much better and faster. Especially for young children, who only have a 10 to 15 minutes concentration span, it is important to keep having fun during their classes – to keep up their attention and remember better what they learn. That is why, we’ve been encouraging more and more creativity into the classroom and organising fun days for our students, where the main goal is: to have fun! Just before Christmas, we had a Christmas crafts day organised by some of our long-term volunteers, and we are now organising a soccer tournament, which will take place in March.

Increasing Student-Teacher time
Now that we have more classroom space and our teacher team is complete – we can finally increase our student-teacher time and make creativity a permanent part of our curriculum. That is why we have recently introduced weekly ‘extra-classes’. Every Monday, all students receive one extra hour of class, and to empower our teachers to use more creativity in their own lessons, Arts is one of the three subjects for the extra classes, alongside Khmer Literacy and Mathematics.

Helping Hands Alumni giving back!
Do you remember our Grade 9 students who graduated in November? We are very happy to announce that five of them have come back to Helping Hands, volunteering every day after school in our library - keeping it clean and tidy, helping the younger students with their homework or reading with them. One of the volunteer-students is now shadowing our Social Worker a few days a week when she does home visits, and in the future some of them will spend more time in the classroom assisting our teachers with their classes.

Another great success that we want to share is that Lap, one of our Scholarship Students will graduate this month from his University course of Nursing and Midwifery! In between the end of his classes and his final exam, he also wanted to give back to Helping Hands – so he spent the month of January volunteering at with us, training our five volunteer-students in First Aid and tidying up our first aid box and supplies.

In line with our vision of empowering the villagers to help themselves, creating opportunities like these are immensely important. The hands-on experience these volunteer-students - who still have three years to go until they finish high school - will gain from working with us, will give them the opportunity to explore different working fields and have good job opportunities in the future.

Small donations for Big Impact
As you may know, Helping Hands’ work can only continue with the help of generous donors like you! We are currently in big need of donations to be able to continue helping our village.

No matter how small your contribution or donation, here in Cambodia it can make a huge impact in the lives of our students.

We know that some of our supporters don’t have the opportunity to fundraise or give big amounts – and that is why we want to encourage more small, but sustainable giving!

You can already get involved by becoming a monthly donor for just a small amount. An amount as small as a dollar will already make a difference!

A big thank you to all of our supporters and donors – who make it possible for us to continue empowering, helping and teaching here in Cambodia.

Home is where the heart is

After the move and official opening at the beginning of August, we have been able to really make our new school feel like HOME for all of our staff and students!

It has been difficult to say goodbye to our old school site, but we take with us all of our memories in our hearts AND we wouldn’t be in Cambodia if we didn’t think about ways to creatively re-use and recycle everything and anything that we could from the old location!

Our students happily helped to get bricks, woods and other materials from the old site to be re-used on our new site. No matter how young or old, all students were eager to help in any way they could.

We've also had some wonderful help with decorating the school by our volunteers from Durham University, who have spent some time painting a classroom wall and our toilet block. Our students love the result, which is colorfol and education at the same time!

Running for our school

On the 25^th August, to kick-off this new chapter for Helping Hands in a fun and interactive way, Helping Hands organized the very first Helping Hands Temple Run!

This fun and sportive challenge, in which teams of Helping Hands students competed against each other in a relay-race around the Prasat Char Temple in the village, was organized FOR and BY the Helping Hands staff and students, in order to raise much needed funds for our programs.

Not only did we raise over US$700, that will go towards our much needed running costs, it was also an amazing and fun day for our students to get active, have fun together and to unite for the future of their school.

Another BIG Thank you to all who sponsored our running teams!
Watch the in-action video of the Temple Run 2017 here.

Hard work pays off.

We are very proud of our teachers, who have all worked so immensely hard in the past months to ensure the new school got up and running, doing extra tasks in coordinating additional building activities, all besides just running their normal class schedules and doing lesson planning too!

At Helping Hands we find it important to celebrate successes, but also give our staff opportunities for growth and professional development.

That’s why in the next academic year, starting for Helping Hands at the beginning of December, some of our teachers will be taking on new and exciting responsibilities. Thorng, Khmer Basic Teacher, will start teaching some English Basic Classes and Sopheap will take on more responsibilities in coordinating the Education Program.

On World Teacher Day we celebrated these successes with the teachers and supporting staff, who work just as hard, by cooking together, and Project Coordinator Nang organized a fun Lucky Draw game. Even the students contributed to celebrate and honour their teachers by helping cook and donating some food & drinks for the occasion.

 Celebrating wonderful achievements

In October, at the end of this Academic year, 11 of our eldest students graduated from Helping Hands and their Secondary School with great success.

On the 20^th October their parents, teachers, brothers and sisters, other HH students, Scholarship students and Village and Government school representatives witnessed the celebration of success of these 11 champions, who successfully completed Helping Hands’ English Pre-Intermediate Program.

It is indescribable how immensely proud we are of each and every one of them. It feels as if it was yesterday that they were just learning their ABC’s, and now look at them - they are strong and independent young adults, ready to embark onto their next exciting adventure: High School.

We let them go with a smile and a tear – but are 100% positive that they will succeed in all that the future may bring them. And we never say goodbye forever, as we will keep up to date with their where-abouts and some of them might even come back to volunteer at the school for a few hours per week!

 Help us reach our goal – Helping Hands End-Of-Year Giving Challenge

The end of the year is coming up, and so is our very exciting 2017 End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign.

In order for Helping Hands to continue doing great work at our wonderful new school and optimizing our site by installing solar power and a plumbing system, there are still many funds to raise!

That is why, for the 2017 end-of-year campaign we will be taking on the challenge of raising our total remaining running costs for the year PLUS the costs for these two additional projects – the total of which will be announced shortly - in the form of monthly giving.

If just 150 of our followers and supporters would sign up as monthly givers for, for example $25 a month, we can already run sustainably for a whole year!

Will you help us achieve this wonderful goal? You can already start helping by signing up as a monthly donor.

Keep an eye on this space and our Facebook Page as we will announce more detailed information on this truly exciting End-Of-Year Campaign for Helping Hands.

A big thank you from the team for all your amazing ongoing support, we couldn't do all the work we do without you!

Sita, Nang, Chris, Sopheap and all the teachers, other staff and students!