Free education for 300 children in rural Cambodia

The last few months have been busy months at Helping Hands and there is a lot to tell you. We hope you enjoy reading all about what we and the students at Helping Hands have been up to - after all, it’s because of you that we can do all the things that we do!

Scholarship success for Helping Hands Students

We’re currently also in the middle of the process of selecting this young adults from the village who are eligible for a Helping Hands scholarship. With support from sponsors these students will have the opportunity to learn for a degree or vocational qualification, with which they’ll be able to find a good job to support themselves and their families, and have a brighter future. We are delighted, therefore to report on the success of just two of our current scholarship students!

K, who was studying at a vocational training school in Siem Reap, graduated from his one year course to become a chef. One of his teachers said: “K. is a very dedicated student and one of the most eager to learn.”

K will now start a 3 month internship this month at one of the top hotels in Siem Reap. We’re very excited for him, and sure he will do amazingly well there.

And at university, another student is soon to graduate with a bachelors’ degree in Finance and Accounting. He presented his research paper presentation last week, and did a marvelous job. Next year he will be the first Helping Hands student to take up a  Master’s degree with a scholarship from Helping Hands.

If you are interested in sponsoring a scholarship student you can read more about the scholarship programme here.

And success for our staff too!

Helping Hands wouldn’t be the same without all our amazing staff. That’s why we’d like to share that we are immensely proud of our two English Teachers Nang and Sopheap, who last month successfully completed a training course with Limited Resources Teacher Training (LRTT).

This training brought teacher trainers from all over the world to work with teachers from NGO’s in Siem Reap. The trainers did classroom observations, which were followed by training days.

Our teacher Sopheap said : “Last year’s training was good, but this year the training was even better! We felt like our trainers were so involved with us and they adjusted their feedback and training to the individual teachers. Everyone could learn at their own level”.

Nang and Sopheap’s trainers said of them: “We were already blown away by the way that Nang and Sopheap teach their students at Helping Hands, but on the training days on top of learning more things themselves, they helped the less experienced teachers to learn as well. They are truly amazing.”

Another teacher who we are proud of is Teacher Yoeuy, who in the past months graduated from being a volunteer in the library to a volunteer teacher! He takes every opportunity he can get to learn more and grow into his new role.  

Another reason to celebrate!

It seems like only yesterday that the whole village came together to build our school, with even the smallest villagers walking around with tiles for the classroom floor. But actually we will be celebrating Helping Hands’ 10^th anniversary next month! Ten years of empowering people rural Cambodia to help themselves. Ten years of laughing, crying, doing, learning, helping, teaching, achieving and inspiring.

Keep your eyes on this space, our blog, Facebook and Instagram as we look back on these ten brilliant years, with a smile and a tear, and you’ll find out how you can play your part help us to continue ‘giving a hand-up’ in the next 10 years!  

Busy times at Helping Hands!

In the past months it has been very busy at Helping Hands, particularly in the month of July, when we hosted a group of 11 volunteers from Durham University in the UK. They came through our parent organization Globalteer and it was the first time we had such a big group of volunteers at Helping Hands!

The Helping Hands site may be small, but these volunteers managed to keep the students busy both inside and outside the classroom with great workshops in science, geography, creative writing, English conversation, dance and sports, and they also found some time to help out making some educational resources for the English lessons.

One of the volunteers about Helping Hands: “The project is responsible and meaningful. It is very obvious that the kids benefit hugely from attending Helping Hands in addition to their government school”

We’d like to say a big thank you to the Durham University group. If you would like to know more about volunteering at Helping hands, please go to: http://volunteercambodia.org.uk/volunteer/

We hope you have enjoyed reading out latest update and we look forward to bringing you more exciting news with our next report. In the meantime keep an eye out for news of our 10^th anniversay celebrations.

Thank you from all of us at Helping Hands.

Education for the whole community is at the heart of our strategy at Helping Hands as it brings the most sustainable and long term benefits, whether it be training in agriculture and nutrition, lessons in personal hygiene, or sponsoring students through university. In this report we look at three recent and exciting educational highlights. 

Helping our staff to be the best!

We can't give the students at Helping Hands the best education without making sure our staff are as well trained as possible. As you probably know we are sponsoring our project co-ordinator Nang through a Masters in Education and recently more of our staff have been enjoyig on the job training. Our gardener, Rhi, has been learning more about organic farming and permaculture and two of our Kindergarten teachers have been shadowing teachers at a highly regarded state school in a nearby district.

Gardener Rhi learnt so much in just one week of volunteering with a local NGO that we can already see the results in the garden: nutritious, fresh morning glory, long beans and pumpkins are already shooting up from the ground, which are all essential parts of our breakfast programme.

Teachers Kong and SaoVanna have been assisting and observing in kindergarten classes at a state primary school where they had the opportunity to learn from their peers, share ideas, resources and teaching methods.

The feedback was hugely positive with one of our teachers telling us:

"This school is great. It has so many resources and I’ve learnt so much from the teachers at this school. Whenever I have more questions, I have their number and I go to meet them to learn more. My dream is that one day Helping Hands will grow into becoming as great as this school". 

We are sure that with their enthusiasm and dedication they are absolultely right about that!

Kindergarten Prize Giving

We believe that it is important to reward good work - after all, children would rather be playing all day long, and recently it was the turn of kindergarten students to show us their best. Rewarding hard work boosts students’ confidence and will give them motivation to keep doing their best.

So, after the Khmer New Year Holiday, when students and teachers had time to settle back into their routine again, kindergarten classes started their end-of-term exams. It was a busy week for the students and they all tried their hardest. So after the exam results were announced, there were prizes for the top three performing students in each class. You can see three of our proud students in the photo below...

Creative Writing with a Purpose

We are always keen to look at new and interesting ways to engage our students in order to help them learn and develop. So recently 20 of our secondary students aged 14-17 took part in a creative writing workshop on the theme of change.

The students are all going through the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood, in which they face many changes and challenges in their lives. As they  develop into young adults, they can sometimes feel overwhelmed by feelings and thoughts that arise during this period of change. Through the writing workshop, facilitated by ‘Writing Through’, the students found a way to express their thoughts and feelings on this important topic, whilst also practicing their written and spoken English. Here is an excerpt from one of the poems the group produced:

Change for the future.
Time goes forward.
We lose friends.
We get older …
Time makes these happen …
Time and change sometimes makes us unhappy.
But sometimes happy.

The students found the workshop very stimulating and we hope you agree that they produced some wonderful work.

We hope you have enjoyed reading this update from Helping Hands. We'd like to thank you again for your support and hope that you are as happy as we are with the progress that your support is making possible.

With gratitude,

Everyone at Helping Hands