Empower 300 children and women to overcome poverty

QUARTERLY PROJECTS REPORT

September-November, 2015

1. OVERVIEW

First of all, we would like to give a special thanks to everyone who donated so far, although we still have lots to go but you have touched our heart and you should be proud of yourselves too and we really need more donations to continue our missions to empowering our Cambodians people in our community.    

We are very pleased to write about the progress of our projects to you, so you feel cool that you are going to decide to join us to transform our community.

1. EDUCATION PROJECT

We are educating more than 200 children in our community recently. Most of them come from poor families who really need support from us. 

ENGLISH

After working for 6 months on teaching English to around one hundred students, now we finished our old semester.

On 7th October 2015 we celebrated our graduation ceremony. In this ceremony, our top 3 and hardworking students in each class were rewarded in order to congratulate for their achievements and to encourage all students to work harder in their education. We also invited student’s parents to join this ceremony to get them involve with us in following up and encouraging their children to study.

Our new term has started on 20th October 2015. In this semester, we had discussed and prepared our teaching plan for each book beforehand to ensure our teachers have a common and specific lesson to teach so that we can know our students’ ability clearly from one level to another level that is easy for us to adapt with them in every semester. Moreover, we are also trying to get our students familiar with English by speaking English as much as we can while teaching and try to empower them to use English in class and outside with teachers and friends.

PRESCHOOL

On 9th October 2015 we celebrated our preschool graduation ceremony. We invited their parents to join so we had a chance to give them the message of the significance of education and empower them to involve and pay attention on their children’s learning, if they want to move out of poverty and want their new generation to live in a prosperous life.

 We had 8 preschool students and seven of them are graduated and have  enrolled at public school to pursue their study in grade one, but they still continue studying with us in Khmer class to improve their Khmer knowledge and to keep tract on their behavior and their learning at public school. In HHA, we taught them Khmer alphabets, kid songs, arts and crafts, living values, and maintain their good behavior at all time. We hope this can help them to be a good children, good students, and good citizens in the future.

KHMER CLASS

Our Khmer class was opened when our team saw the absence of education of some children who on their ages to school, but they did not because of their families financial challenges and their parents did not understand the important of education.

After opening this class for two semesters, we see that it is very effective for those children to have the equal opportunities to school as others. All of them are enrolled at public school and still continue studying Khmer and English with us through our scholarship program.

One more problem, our team found out was some students who study English with us have limited Khmer knowledge on writing and reading ( lack of good education at public school), so it make them a bit difficult to learn English.

Regards to this, we open two Khmer classes, morning and afternoon for those students to improve extra Khmer knowledge with us and we are planning to work with the public school teachers in order to strengthen their quality of teaching.

1. VOCATIONAL TRAINING PROJECT

Besides working with the children to have the education and better behaviors, we also provide the sewing skills and life skill lessons to adults or children’s parents to make sure they have the skill to gain the good job, so they can have money to support the families.

SEWING PROGRAM

Our sewing classes have started on the 13th of July, and will be graduated on the 31st of December. They have been learning very well. In advance class, they learned how to make shirts, trousers and dresses. In expert class, they learn how to make traditional top and traditional dress.

The classes are postponed because we got a lot of products order, so the students need to make in the class instead of the lessons. They were happy that they can earn some money when they are learning in the same time.

Three students will be graduated from our advance class and they are moving to expert class and 3 students will be graduated from our expert class.

We are going to start the new term on the 02nd of January 2016.  We supposed to have eight students for the new beginner class. We have been recruiting new students and we have three students interested in this class so far. This term we extend our target to more villages because we want to have the students from different village to learn.

HOME SEWING BUSINESS

Our students have just finished a big uniform order from Bayon School. Some of them made the mistakes with measuring, but they learnt a lot from it. They said, they have much more confident after they made so many of uniform.  Most students feel ashamed with their mistakes but they are still happy to fix them and learn from those mistakes.

Besides the uniform, we also got the order from the individual business owner to make 175 Kromar straw string bags which we have already finished. Moreover, we get the order from a Tour Company to make 200 environment bags for their tourists. It is good opportunity for us to work with them because it is not one time orders but it is on-going that we get a good profit.

1. COMMUNITY SUPPORT PROJECT

Our community support is aim to support the community with microfinance loan, providing necessarily workshops for their everyday lives such as domestic violence, budgeting and child protection workshop and also scholarship program for our students and staff. We are only going to highlight some challenges with microfinance as other programs are doing fine.

MICROFINACNE

We have two additional borrowers who are using our loan at the moment. In total we have 13 loans.

Most loans used for whole sale vegetables at the market and the rests used for rubbish collection business, road side business and sculpture business and animal feedings (pigs, ducks and chicken).

Most of them are OK with the repayment, but only two loans that have the problem. One villager, who is a rubbishes collector, has bad business because the market price is cheap and another one villager who is a flower seller, she delivered a baby, so she has to spend a lot for her family. We have delayed their repayment to help them to stand up again.

Another problem we face was the animal feedings business because those animals died, so our villagers lost the money (animal diseases and limited knowledge on feeding). To solve this problem, we decided to stop providing loan for this business because we don’t think it is effective loan anymore. 

Links:

• Human and Hope Association's Facebook Page

Overview

Human and Hope Association still continue the mission of empowering Cambodians to create sustainable futures for themselves focus on education, vocational training and community support project.

Education

Our education is the main project that providing education to hundred students in our community who ages between 5 to 17 years old which is the need and very useful for their futures, especially English that is very important language for their job now a day.

It is almost one year we moved to a more rural area and we have run two terms for our students. We noted that our students has been improving a lots with both knowledge and attitude if we compare to the beginning, which we are providing them English, Khmer, Preschool, Living values, Library, Art class and Movie Club.

Over one hundred English students are studying from the beginner to the elementary for young adults. Among those students, there are 27 opportunity scholarship students. All students have been improving on reading, writing, listening and speaking, especially our elementary students; they can listen and speak in English with their teacher and their friends.

The three siblings who had never had education before because of the family is very poor and the moved from one province to one province have been studying English and Khmer with us for more than a year, we are so proud of the great progress of their study. They have gone to grade 1 at public school and through their willingness to learn and great behavior they gained good grade in the classroom and due to the age of the oldest brother and a quick improvement, the teacher allows him to swap the class.

We also noted that, the progress of our preschool students have been improving a lot with the ability to read and write the Khmer alphabet and numbers and with their behaviors.

One of our preschool students has learned with us since 2013, has had a great developed with his Khmer and English. He can read and write Khmer alphabet, and numbers and also the English alphabets. And what we have proud with him is the great behavior and progressing of his development.

Our education team finds out some difficulty of the students’ learning, so they decided to create our own textbook and we hope to finish this year. The new book will contain the four macro skills of reading, listening, writing and speaking including exercises, conversation, role-play, spelling, pronunciation, activities and games, teacher’s tips , songs or chants, and also include some Khmer Cultures and Cross-cultures.

“The aims of upgrading the English book is to make more easier for students to learn and they can easily use their English knowledge in their daily lives because the lessons are created to match up with their lives, their houses, their families and their country etc.” Salin, education and community manager

Vocational training

Sewing program

This year we made some improvement and achievement to our sewing program. We introduced Khmer class for the students who cannot read and write Khmer which is helped them a lot with their businesses and had 3 students graduate from beginner class and 4 students from advanced class.

In order to reduce some expenses of the stipend for our students, we provided them a spot of land to grow vegetables and herbs, so the students are responsible for it and get back as stipend instead of ingredient. We also put the chemical free farming lessons in our life skills which is taught by Salin, our education and community manager, so they will learn this skill to do at home too.

After our beginner students graduated, they took out the microfinance loan from us for buying the sewing machines through a grant from Sumar Lakhani Foundation. They now can earn the money through those machines by making the uniforms that we got the order from an organization.

Home sewing business

We got 432 uniforms order from Bayon organization and a lot orders from Phare, the Cambodian circus and also some from the shops. We also launched the online stores in Australia and outside Australia we launched at etsy store which are managed by our Australia board.

Our seamstresses and sewing students have been very busy with making the uniforms for Bayon school students. Through this they can earn money to support their families and also some money will go to our organization, so we can provide the important services to our villagers.

“I am very happy to earn much money at my first time of using the sewing skill”. Srey Mom, sewing student.

Community Support

We are providing loan to 11 villagers for their businesses such as: selling vegetables, pigs farm, chicken farm and road side vendors.

We are providing two staff studying Business administration and English for education at university, three staff studying English and one staff learning computer skill.

We run domestic violence every six months to the villagers which aim to stop and reduce violence in our community. We also run child protection to our Microfinance borrowers and our students which aim to promote child rights and let the child stand for their rights.

Through our community outreach we can find the poorest beneficiaries into our program. We also support a family which had very a bad living condition to a better condition by supporting their 4 children to our education program and hired the mother to work as our sustainable assistant and hired the father to work as our part time security guard.