And you thought your Christmas shopping was taking a long time .......

I can’t believe how close it is to Christmas. It is a bit hard to get in the Christmas spirit when it is 30 degrees outside... doesn’t seem right not to be freezing cold. Christmas is very much celebrated in the village though, and the children have been getting excited for months about the big day. Generally, as a Buddhist country, Cambodia doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but John and Kathy’s American roots mean that our children all get a visit from Santa on Christmas day. This means that Santa’s elves have been busy for weeks preparing stockings for EVERY child. That means individually labelling and packing about 270 stockings and making sure and double sure that there are none missing. The children all got three wishes for their stockings, so they all have one main present (generous donations have meant that the older children are getting MP3 and DVD players!) and an array of smaller presents. It has been a military operation, working in a house with the curtains drawn and windows locked to avoid peeping eyes. The other day I saw one of the boys peering through a crack in the curtains, eyes wide as saucers, but I managed to whip the curtain shut before his friends got a look. Popular presents this year are remote control cars and teddy bears- I am sure some of the teddies are bigger than the children! Two of the boys asked for roller skates so I can’t wait to see them trying them out. On Christmas day I shall be dusting off my old elf suit from 4 years ago and helping Santa to hand out the presents. John said it took over 2 hours to give everything out last year because everyone had to have their picture taken with Santa. I shall upload some pictures after the big day as I am sure I will be taking loads, but until then here are a couple of pictures of elf HQ.

This is one side of the room- all the stockings are colour coded according to which colour house the children live in- so here we have blue, white, orange, green and boy's yellow.......

.... and this is the other side of the room, where we have purple, girl's yellow and red. You can just see some of the cars poking out.

Christmas Baby

A couple of days ago one of the staff in the village (who, four years ago, was one of the NHCC children who I knew really well) went into labour and after a quick dash to the hospital in Phnom Penh gave birth to a baby boy. I had been having discussions with her and her husband about names, and they wanted me to give him a foreign name, but I didn’t feel right naming their baby for them, so I said that I would write down every boys name I could think of and they could say yes or no. After much shortlisting, the four favourite names were David, Henry, Julian and Jerry (yes, I had been thinking of Tom and Jerry). I got a phone call from the hospital just after he was born and they had decided to call him Julian, so I can sort of say that I named a baby (though just for the record it is not a name that I would have picked, but I have grown to quite like it now!) I got to see him when he was two days old, making him both the youngest and the smallest baby I have ever seen and here he is.........

Football's Coming Home

Of an evening there will be many children running around playing on the village football or ‘soccer’ pitch (as I am instructed to call it). I did join in once but unfortunately took one kick of the ball and broke my toenail in half, which has been enough to put me off ever since. Anyway the other week we were challenged to take our football to the next level as we were invited to play in a tournament against a number of international schools in Phnom Penh.  We took four teams, and for a lot of them it was the first time they had ever worn trainers, let alone played any sort of competitive sport so they were all very excited. We entered teams in the under 13 and the under 16 categories, and while the younger children looked vaguely the same age as their international counterparts, the same could not be said for the older children. Cambodian children in general are pretty small, and our children, having had various health challenges are generally even smaller than that so they were dwarfed by some of the other players. While the other three teams put up a valiant fight, and had a great time, it was our team of young boys who were the stars of the day. I was amazed at how good they were, and it bodes well that our children aren’t scared of pain as they were well and truly throwing themselves in. After some great play, the boys made it to the final, and were hugely excited about the prospect of winning the huge trophy they had seen on the display table. The final was very tense, with so many close goals but in the end it ended 0-0, even after extra time leaving no option but penalties. After a quick explanation of what penalties were (!), our goalkeeper stepped up and the shootout began. It was tense... both teams missed..... then both teams scored, then our boys pulled it out of the bag scoring all of their next penalties, and saving all the other teams. CHAMPIONS, and in my soppy state I might have even shed a tear. The trophy was ours, and to celebrate we all went for pizza, coke and ice cream while the children planned where to display our first ever trophy. All in all great day and really nice to see the children getting involved in something where it is not about them being orphans, or having HIV, but just being a group of children playing against other groups of children and having a great time. 

The teams celebrating their win.

Utdom showing off his skills on the pitch... note the inappropriate advertising in the background!

Sokcheat and his opponent going for the ball.

Svat saving goals left right and centre in the penalty shootout in the final.

Celebrating in the Pizza Company afterwards- trying to master how to use a knife and fork!

Some more videos of my day to day life

This is the on site nursery and pre-school. The nursery are in the light blue shirts and the pre-school are in the green. When Megan and I were here for the year we set up the first pre-school, so I always love going back to see how much it has developed since we were here. The two teachers are local women and they are great 

Between 5 and 6 in the evening most of the children head out to the basketball court in the middle of the village to play. This is definitely my favorite time of day, even if it is a little chaotic!

This is a video, that was meant to be a photo, as you will see, but actually in the end is quite a good little video of Happy Home. This is the house that I lived in for a couple of months when I very first came to Cambodia, and it is where the babies and children that need to be close to the hospital live. It features Mel, one of my (many!) new ozzie friends.

Children are not Tourist Attractions

As I seem to remember mentioning in a previous post, there are 289 (or thereabouts) orphanages in Phnom Penh. There are some which are great, however there are many that are not. There are lots of orphanages that are basically run to exploit the children by sending them out begging and selling stuff to tourists late at night. Most traveller guesthouses in Phnom Penh will also have posters up on the walls featuring smiling children encouraging tourists to come and visit. I hate these posters, especially as I know full well that these children, who are basically used to entertain tourists and get them to donate money, don’t actually get to see any of this profit. They are generally run by someone who takes everything and leaves the children with nothing- in a lot of the cases they don’t even have food. We have quite a few children under our care who have run away or been rescued from places like this. The problem is, in a corrupt country such as this, a lot of the time these organisations will have some sort of links in high places, so receive warning of spot inspections by groups like unicef and make themselves look presentable.  That is why I was so happy to see this poster featuring on walls around Phnom Penh. It is entitled ‘Children are not tourist attractions’ and I think it quite powerful and will hopefully make people think and consider the credentials of the organsiations that they are visiting more carefully. There is an accompanying website which makes for interesting reading about ‘orphanage tourism’ in Cambodia:  http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforevisiting/

Puppies

So here is my first experiment with video on this blog..... hopefully it will work. It is just a short video of some of the puppies and some of the pre-school children playing around in the village. The puppies are sort-of considered moving cuddly toys to the children, but no harm has been done........yet.

I bought one of the puppies down to my house to get a couple of tics off its skin, and afterwards she promptly fell asleep on the floor of my bedroom, so I entertained myself for half an hour by testing comedy glasses. Its a wild life out here!

This is Feonee, now renamed Lulu, who is living with her new best friend Vienna (the baby).

Factory Girls

If you have ever taken a look at the labels in your clothing I could almost guarantee that something you own would be ‘Made in Cambodia’, especially if your clothes are from H&M, Zara, Gap, American Eagle, Hollister, Abercrombie and Fitch, Ralph Lauren , Nike.......and the list goes on. I live in Kompong Speu province, and to get to and from the city we drive down national road 4. Lining this road are small market towns, and beyond that rice paddies and a LOT of very large factories. John once told me that there are 400,000 people (mostly women) employed in factories in our province alone. Driving down the road at either 6am or 6pm is a pretty amazing sight. There are thousands upon thousands of women out on the road, loading onto trucks back to their villages in rather alarming numbers... on the roof, out the back, hanging off the sides. These women work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and earn about $70 a month. Working it out, it probably equates to about $0.25 an hour. If someone had told me this four years ago I would have been disgusted, and would have agreed with anyone who crusaded against these factories. Living out here has changed my mind completely. I don’t think that these factories are ideal, and I won’t be queuing to get a job any time soon, but I have seen how, in a poor rural setting, where there is no other work except rice farming, these factories are providing valuable jobs for women to support their families, and it stops them turning to the other main profession for women here: prostitution. Obviously I don’t support dimly lit sweatshops that uses slave labour, but most of the factories owned by the large companies are well regulated. There was a story a few years ago where the BBC was doing an exposé on factories employing underage people. The problem with this is that it is almost impossible to tell age, as everyone in Cambodia looks about 10 years younger than they are, and also the majority of people actually have no idea of their age. So they got access to this factory and wanted to interview some of the women who were prepared to tell them that there were girls under 16 working there. The women were paid $10 for the interview. To people who earn $50 a month, $10 is a big deal, so of course there were loads of women willing to say whatever was necessary to get their $10. I am sure there probably were a few girls younger than 16 working there, but the result of this investigation was that the company who owned the factory (I think it was Nike) got wind of this potential bad publicity and shut the factory down. A triumph against child labour they said- but what about the 4000 women who lost their job that day, and therefore lost their only means of buying food for their family. There are definitely two sides to every story, and until there is another viable solution, they are providing valuable money for people that would otherwise have none.