sponsorship and serendipity and COLT

Serendipity is  both a beach in Sihanoukville and a strange alignment of coincidences that saw me meet up with a couple from Canada that have been sponsoring families in Cambodia for a number of years.  They were staying at the same guest-house we were and I started chatting to them one night, Patsy and Johnny are a great couple that have been doing wonderful work in Cambodia for many...

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Rum Dual School, REAM River - working bee

The view from the school over the farmland to the river My good friends Ciaran and Audrey had been telling me about the work they were doing teaching at the Rum Dual School on the banks of the Ream River and the place sounded wonderful, especially after talking with Jim, one of the volunteer support  co-ordinators, earlier in the week.  I had finally organised to visit and have a look for myself.  I...

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moving along

Things have started to move along, having started slowly.  I have visited another school, in the poorer rural area surrounding Sihanoukville.  We have also met with one of the directors of an orphanage, I plan to visit the Orphanage and see if we are able to help them out, more on that later.  We are also starting to network with the volunteers that are running various NGO's as well...

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Donor and donations update

A huge thank you to Richard in Nymboida, he's giving $A20 a fortnight into the donation account, awesome !  The generosity of some from our tiny local community still leaves me overwhelmed. Just  to show it's not all heart breaking work, I go to a quiz night at one of the local pubs on a Monday night, for a couple of reasons, to unwind and have fun with a few of the other ex-pats but also to network with them to find groups we can work with to help out.  Surprisingly one of the ex-pats even gave a donation,...

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Petty Cash Account

Having to work with two different currencies (AUD and USD) is proving a bit of a nightmare of accounting.    The solution we've come up with is to run a small petty cash account, where we take a chunk of money out of the donations account and transfer it across as cash to use.  This means we only have to deal with the one currency conversion and allows smaller one off donations and materials purchases to occur easily.  Cambodia is strictly a cash only economy.  We will post a reconciliation of...

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CHOICE - Phnom Penh

C.H.O.I.C.E I had heard only good things about these guys before, so when we first arrived I tried to find them from a brochure I'd been given but they had moved their meeting place and alas we'd run out of time before I had a chance to see them operate. We were headed back to Phnom Penh from Sihanoukville to look to get a bicycle as the range in Sihanoukville was very limited and I had actually completely forgotten about visiting...

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Otres Beach - Painting Smiles School

Painting Amid teaching and learning how to teach the kids at the Painting Smiles School, we finally managed to paint the inside of the building when the rollers arrived, the two small rooms are looking great. The lack of teaching aids means it is very difficult for the kids to learn.  They barely have enough money to live, let alone buy school books and the Government doesn't help much in this...

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Helping other organisations in Cambodia

A seed of an idea was planted after a recent email conversation with a good friend who had done some volunteer work in the Ukraine recently.  We recognise that our experience on the ground here in Cambodia is very limited, so why not help out those organisations with limited access to funds, instead of trying to duplicate what they are already doing or trying to do ?  A small amount used wisely can go a long way in Cambodia.  Catherine, thank you so much for you hard-work and...

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