A friend of mine from South Korea informed me about New Futures Organisation. As taken from the NFO website:
NFO is a non-governmental organisation based in the town of Takeo, Cambodia. We run an orphanage which cares for local children who would otherwise be left homeless. NFO also operates a chain of rural schools in the villages surrounding Takeo town. These schools offer free education to children in remote villages who are unable to attend regular classes.
The beauty of NFO is that you do not have to pay hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to volunteer, nor do you have to commit to a specific period of time. Although, even after one day, I can see why it’s suggested to volunteer for a longer amount of time. What NFO really needs is an army of long-term volunteers, and more donations… But, I’m hoping we’ll be able to do some good in our 5 day (possibly longer) stay.
We quickly learned that NFO is a rather laid back organization. Which is really great, but not what we were expecting. We were sort of expecting to show up and be immediately put to work, maybe in a classroom, maybe doing manual labor around the volunteer center, or the orphanage itself… Instead our welcome was more like… “So, what do you want to do here?” when we weren’t exactly sure what there was to do in the first place.
We decided to substitute teach a class for one of the other volunteers who was going to go out to the village school that afternoon instead of teaching at the orphanage. This may have been a better idea if the majority of the kids at the orphanage weren’t fishing that afternoon. We had three students in our “class” who immediately lost interest once others returned from their fishing trip.
Srey Nang did a few letters on her worksheet with me, attempted to practice some full sentences, and then promptly ran off. Andrew’s student was a little more studious than mine. Not knowing if Srey Nang was going to return, I pulled out my camera to take a few pictures. She returned, quickly took a liking to my camera, and began photographing every single worksheet she had completed.
Once she was finished, we played hangman. She would spy a word written on the wall behind me and have me guess letters until I lost. Then she giggled when I pointed out “I said G! I said Y!” as she filled in “angry birds” (copying it from the wall behind me) in the missing blanks.
(Who cares about English when you can open every app on an iphone instead?)
A: What are they listening to?
me: Fareed Zakaria.
After “class,” Andrew played chess (rather, Andrew got his butt kicked playing chess) while I kicked a ball around in the courtyard with one of the newest additions to the orphanage. He and his brother don’t speak any English yet, so kicking a ball around worked for both of us.
Close to 50 kids live at the orphanage, with only about 3 or 4 around the clock supervisors. It’s pretty bare, and could use an army of volunteers to come in and plant a garden (and educate the kids on how to maintain it), or put down a new floor for the dining room area, or clean out the pond, or re-do the various open aired rooms that used to be used for dance/exercise/play rooms. Other volunteers let on that the Khmer in general, don’t have the strongest work ethic, which can be seen not only at the volunteer center, but perhaps at the orphanage as well. There’s a general level of disorganization going on, and so while I feel a little badly I can’t stay longer, at least now I know what I can come back to, or perhaps convince my mom to form an army to come and work on some specific projects in a two week (or hopefully longer) time period. I’m also hoping (praying. crossing my fingers) that I can at least organize some friends and family back home to send some toothbrushes and pens this way.
me: I think my mom could do some damage here… you know, in a good way…
Andrew: Yea, Give Mrs. G a month and she’ll get some things done.
(We figured out rather quickly, our warm room is less warm with the door open and the lights off.)