Harpswell Foundation (Community Youth Project)

Part of my volunteer service includes working with the Community Youth Development sector. There's a small group of us that are labeled under this sector and from my understanding we're also the last group to be working under the CYD title. There are a few advantages to be working under this title but at the same time it really doesn't make any difference because no matter what, most volunteers (health and education) end up doing community projects with a great deal of youth and community involvement. However, one of the special perks working under this title is that we get to have a choice to break away from teaching in the classrooms and work with an NGO (Non Government Organization). I, however, do not have this luxurious choice since I live in a very rural area and there are no NGO's located anywhere near I live. I will continue teaching in the classrooms under a routine schedule and try to come up with other projects that my students want to get more involved with. It would be nice to find a position with an NGO that would help me get more involved with project design and development but I'm happy to have the freedom of choice to design my own projects at my site.
So now that I've explained what the CYD program is all about  let me share with you an amazing project that we CYD peeps got to work on. We provided a two day workshop for an all girl academy called the Harpswell Foundation. It's an amazing organization (http://harpswellfoundation.org/')  that provides free housing, education, and leadership training to the most brightest and amazing young women in Cambodia. We partnered up with them and provided courses that can help empower these young ladies in different subjects areas, such as: goal setting, healthy relationships,study skills, gender empowerment, womens nutritional health, yoga and self defense. I got to team up with a great gal pal of mine and we conducted our workshop on confidence building. We provided tools on how to be aware when one may have low levels of self confidence and how one may be able to increase their levels of self esteem by doing self reflection activities with art and journal writing. I'm really happy on how much these girls got out of our workshops and how advanced they were able to think on a critical level. It was a very endearing experience and I'm so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work such an awesome group of people. I really enjoyed listening to their presentations and hearing what the girls responses were.

K6's Arrival (One year done! One more to go!)

It's hard to believe that I've been living in Cambodia for thirteen months already. The new group of volunteers (k 6's) arrived from the U.S less than a month ago. We went to the airport to greet them and to shower them with our wonderful and creative signs. The signs were covered with messages and slogans that we as volunteers often hear on a daily basis from other Cambodians.

Cambodians LOVE Angry birds. They wear caps, shirts, jackets, backpacks and even jeans that are covered with Angry Birds.

Cambodians like to ask this question everyday.

So, so true! They are everywhere, including the rats. Although...i think i have more mice at my house than rats.

Traveling Health Fair

A fellow health volunteer invited me along to be apart of a traveling health fair in our provincial site. I was happy to be included in on this project because it gave me the opportunity to travel to the schools and sites that are close by where I live. I also got to see where my provincial partners (fellow volunteers) live, meet their host family members and scope out their surroundings. I'm always curious to see how other volunteers live and what their homes look like. This was a great opportunity not only to visit my fellow neighbors site but to also help carry a positive and healthy message to our communities. We visited four different sites in a matter of one week. We each biked to each others site (which was exciting and exhausting at the same time), slept and ate in each others homes and presented on different health subjects at the high schools we visited. I did a health exercise on yoga and had about four to five sessions at each site. I had many students that were very shy to do it but they eventually got into it and were motivated to keep trying. The other volunteers did presentations on traffic safety, recycling, germs and sanitation and nutritional health. Our goal was to provide education on topics that aren't normally taught in schools or that are often neglected to be talked about by parents and other community members.

Volunteers conducting a role play on traffic safety. Cambodia is notorious for not following safety guidelines when driving along the roads. Motor bike drivers and car drivers hardly pay attention to road rules, they drive at an extremely dangerous speed and there are no regulations because police officers do not pull over people for breaking the traffic laws or for going over the speed limit. Cambodia has a very high percentage with car accidents and deaths. We just wanted these students to be aware of traffic road rules and how to be a cautious driver especially at night because there tends to be a lot of drunk drivers.

Another volunteer doing a presentation on how to reduce, reuse and recycle. Plastic bags in Cambodia are everywhere and it causes a lot of pollution and trash buildup. Since the trash systems are almost nonexistent in Cambodia mostly everyone is subjected into having to burn there own trash. I can't tell you how many times I've walked out of my house to the smell of burning trash. Sometimes, I can even smell it before I go to bed at night. It's unfortunate because Cambodians are left with no other options with getting rid of their piles of trash other than burning it.

Khmer Awards Ceremony

At the end of the 2012 school year I was invited to attend an awards ceremony at the local primary school in my village. Awards for high achievements were given out to students in grade levels one through six. Most award ceremonies in Cambodia are attended by people in high position and authority. For instance, the head monk from our watt, the village chief, the police chief and of course the primary and secondary school directors awarded certificates to the students. I was happy to see that the ceremony had a strong sense of community and parental support.  At the end of the ceremony, the primary school director asked if I could speak for a few moments about the education system in the U.S. My counterpart, Vanny, helped translate for me as I tried to explain what the similarities and differences are between Cambodia and the U.S. I mentioned how we don't have school on Saturdays, that the children usually attend school from eight to three thirty, that most award ceremonies do not include village or communal chiefs because we don't have any but that the students in the U.S. are almost as excited as the children in Cambodia to receive certificates. Well actually that's a lie because mostly everyone in Cambodia treats certificates like gold. Cambodians will treat their certificates with the utter most care and heaven forbid you spell their name wrong. They will call you out, hunt you down and fight to have it changed to their liking.

Summer Love'n

I've been on summer break since the beginning of July and my days at site have been filled with teaching, art and movies. I've been happy that I've actually been able to keep myself busy and not be driven to boredom. At first, I was a little scared that none of my projects would pick up and I would be left with empty classrooms but so far that has not been the case. From Monday through Friday I teach my English class for adults and teachers. The attendance varies anywhere between seven to ten students but these are the same students who have stuck with me since December. They're determined to keep learning English and as long as they have their determination to keep coming to class then I will continue my dedication to teaching them.

 After my English class for teachers I have my English movie camp for my young students. I have to say that this has been one of my favorite classes to teach not just because we get to watch fun movies but because the students have become really receptive in picking up the English language through the lessons and activities that I've been teaching them. Every week we watch a movie for thirty minutes in class and I provide the students with a vocabulary list, sentence blocks from the movie that they have to read and put in order and then I also have them work on their artistic skills by drawing who their favorite character from the movie is and they have to explain why.

 These are some of their drawings my students have done from Kung Fu Panda one and two.

 These are some of my art students. Our art club is still going strong and we still meet every Sunday. On this particular day my students thought it would be a good idea to make angry birds out of balloons. I love it!

 LOL!!! I told my students to draw a robot and one of my students drew an umbrella.

 For week three a good friend of mine recommended that we watch Wall-e. Me and the kids loved it! It's a great movie that doesn't have a lot of dialogue and so there's a lot more focus on behavioral interaction. I had my students design and draw their own robots. This is what they came up with.

 These are some of my art students who are looking at drawings and pictures on my computer. I like to bring them closer to the art world by exposing their young minds to different artists and their work.

 These are my students from the movie camp. They're working on making their own journals.

 I've said it once and I'll say it a million times over, I am so grateful for my counterpart, Vanny. Her and her family own a bookshop that has an outdoor classroom built in the back of the bookshop. Thanks to her I'm able to have my movie camp at her bookshop because her dad built a stand that has a t.v. hooked up to it. She has been so gracious to let us use this wonderful space.