Q4 2023

2023 has come and gone. Has it been a year that was meaningful to you? Asking ourselves if something or an action is meaningful is probably one of the most important questions we should ask ourselves. Because in doing so, we will then know if something has served us in a beneficial way and in that if it is so, cumulatively, our right actions would make our life worthwhile. This would then dovetail with the Buddha’s teaching of the precious human life, of its rarity and the opportunities it offers to practise the dharma.

*Living meaningfully… Our team member, helping others to feed themselves and to feed others*

An entity like ours and BLCP is no different because these are merely vehicles which facilitate the intentions of the people behind the organisation to undertake meaningful actions. We translate the intentions of our supporters like you to bring benefits of primarily health care and education to the children in Cambodia. The scale of our activities is significant and wide ranging in that we are instrumental in enabling potable water for both drinking and hygiene to about 200,000 students, dental care for over 30,000 students and much more that we will share with you in this newsletter.

Anglungkuki Community School

While we continue to have responsibilities at the “macro” level in looking after the needs of children who study at the 900 schools where we maintain water tanks, at the ‘micro’ level, we also operate a Community School in the village of Anglungkuki, located about 14kms from Kampot, the idyllic town where our head office is based. In addition to formal studies, the school emphasises holistic learning where we teach living skills and positive character development which are essential attributes in order to lead meaningful lives. Our students are taught cooking and vegetable planting skills, care for the environment in village cleanups and learn traditional Khmer dances.

The school is led by our principal, Sok who was a former student of BLCP English class. The courage of his conviction to be a school teacher was unwavering despite a major mishap he encountered as a child. He continues to inspire the children in school to move forward in life with courage and determination. For 2024, his plans are to inculcate the creative spirit and to instil confidence of caring actions in the children. He welcomes volunteers at the school because he believes an open mind is a progressive mind.

Community Development (CD)

Our CD Program’s primary role is to look after the home welfare of the students of our Community School. We identify the poorest of our students who currently number about 40 and provide them with various assistance including meals in school, paying for additional coaching lessons, school allowance and undertake home improvements to make for better living conditions.

We help the parents of the children in undertaking Income Generating Activities (IGA) in order to achieve financial independence and food security. We are able to create natural demand of the farm produce by buying from the IGA village participants and use these as food supplies for cooking free meals for the children. Not only the farmers are enjoying an income but the children are able to consume organically grown nutritious foods. We now have 30 families involved in agriculturally based IGA including pig rearing, poultry and growing vegetables.

We facilitated various community education programs covering early marriage of girls, dental and health care and training courses in agriculture by local authorities and other NGOs.

Dental Program

Our four dental clinics provide oral care to over 80 schools and supplement the treatments provided with Oral Health Education and toothbrush kits. We continue to review our treatment plans in order to achieve greater efficiency and to enable a greater number of students to have access to dental care.

The digitalisation of our student patient dental records recently is enabling us to undertake big data analysis to guide our work strategies for effective delivery. Volunteering stints as dentists are available in our Dental Program.

WASH Program

The team monitors and ensures the proper maintenance of both the water tanks and water purification systems (WPS) in schools. We have completed rollout of 180 WPS to schools and have another 500 more to go which we hope to complete the exercise within 8 years.

We emphasize the use of durable bottles and food containers to reduce rubbish generation and a healthy diet of foods sold in school. While staying healthy from consumption of available clean, safe water and less sugary processed foods, students have a positive school experience from a cleaner environment. We share our experience of guiding school improvements through various modes including advice and distributing compilation of effective methods used by certain schools.

Education Program

We have been able to improve the proficiency of our English teachers who are responsible for teaching over 1,500 students a day. We introduced several initiatives including additional training and workshops, classroom delivery feedback and incentives to encourage better performance. Mentorship was introduced to enable more proficient teachers to help their less able colleagues.

Model Schools are a way for us to focus our attention on school facilities improvement with the hope that the Government will use as a benchmark for setting school standards. We now have under our wings 9 schools benefiting over 2,000 students. Not only for a better school environment, students are able to gain living skills like vegetable planting where we shared in the cost with the schools in implementing such projects.

We will be embarking on further improvements in the new year in order to make it a meaningful 2024 and hope that you will be able to do the same while we continue to receive your support.

Q1 2024

Q3 2023

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