Carnival Time
It's been three weeks since I blogged!
We just had our open house yesterday, a big scale carnival with 100+ children, ran completely by volunteers with no professional carnival running experience.
So everything was somewhat self made.
Decor was self done, games were made up of tin cans, boxes, rings, ping pong balls and stuff, prizes were self wrapped stuffed toys, and music was blasted from the speakers that were already in the school. On car batteries since the electricity blacked out. (Plan B if the batteries didn't work were to blast music from the car stereo by maxing the volume and opening all the doors).
I think the villagers were somewhat amused by us,
as we went out in teams to distribute flyers for the carnival the week before.
Villagers being villagers are always kampong friendly,
i enjoyed the walk around, smiling and playing with the children.
Planning the carnival was hard hard work.
For the last week at least,
we have 12 hour days of getting things done outside and after dinner and shower back home,
it's meetings until we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore past midnight.
Sok son and I were at the bank watching the bankers chit chat during office hours the other day and he commented on how cambodians seem quite free.
"everyone is free except us," i quipped. "We keep working until we fall asleep! i'm even busier than when i was in singapore!"
The carnival was somewhat a success. We only had 5 people, each manning one booth, to entertain 100+ children, with another 3 helpers roaming around to resuscitate any drowning volunteer.
Halfway through the carnival it started raining and we had to stop the games and carry all the tables, props and queue stands (which are really rafia strings tied to chairs) indoors to the 2nd floor.
What an experience it was making 100+ children queue up and wait while some of us hurriedly carried stuff indoors and set up everything in there.
"Who runs carnivals like this?" I was smiling to myself while lugging chairs upstairs.
If you thought that was bad, then what came next is much worse.
Pack 100+ children indoors in a little room with no electricity (and hence no fans), with bad ventilation and what you get is a refugee zone with a lot of noise, very stale air, very humid heat, and an interesting smell of everyone combined.
I literally got a headache upon stepping into the room for the first time.
My hats off to the volunteers who stayed in there the entire time till the end of the carnival.
It was backbreaking work with all the picking of the balls, and under those conditions, i wouldn't blame them for thinking it was torture.
But they did it all with much gung ho-ness and joy.
-----------------------------------------------------
Our school is now finally up and ready to run.
New paints are up, decorations up, furniture and toys have moved in, the road is done, the playground is touched up.
It has definitely come a long way from the beginning.
But more than that it's the new lease of life we've brought to the place.
The building has always been there, donated by a team from australia years back.
But it was an empty shell of a place.
now you often hear the squeals of little children, their smiles, and the team of locals who hang around a lot more.
The local that we'll be eventually handing the school over to loves children.
you can see his enthusiasm when he teaches in class,
in fact some of the children he knows well calls him Papa.
The carnival was an announcement of sorts to the villagers that we were ready to start classes.
A marketing event somewhat.
Tomorrow we're running an official registration day for the parents, where we thought we had to try hard for them to sign up.
Our target is 70 children, and already today we've hit 49.
------------------------------------------------------------
The faces of the children when they play the toys we brought over is precious and priceless.
These are toys the singaporean children may not even want to play with anymore,
like the fishing game and the big lego and drawing board stuff.
but when you see how the cambodian children play with these toys,
you'll understand now why there is so much we can do to share what we have with those who don't.
It's not just the toys.
From a bigger picture, we can share a lot more of our expertise and experiences with these pple who don't have these things through no fault of theirs.
----------------------------------------------------------
the children of the village are truly cute.
cute, simple and shy.
Simply precious.
----------------------------------------------------------
Other interesting things that happened:
1) I just found a higher-than-high beam in the car the other day.
And then i realise my higher-than-high beam is actually the high beam.
which means what i thought was "high beam" is actually my normal lights.
which means what i thought was "normal light" is actually dashboard light = no headlights.
So i've been driving at night with no headlights!
no wonder pple seem so unfriendly and aggressive at night,
they don't give way and they keep staring.
now i know why.
they can't see me!
2) blogspot was supposedly blocked by my internet provider.
so i access my blog using a proxy server by going to another website.
suddenly that website is now blocked.
and before i could go "alamak now i can't read my blog", i found that blogspot is no longer blocked!
--------------------------------------------------------
alrightee, time to sleep.
It's been three weeks since I blogged!
We just had our open house yesterday, a big scale carnival with 100+ children, ran completely by volunteers with no professional carnival running experience.
So everything was somewhat self made.
Decor was self done, games were made up of tin cans, boxes, rings, ping pong balls and stuff, prizes were self wrapped stuffed toys, and music was blasted from the speakers that were already in the school. On car batteries since the electricity blacked out. (Plan B if the batteries didn't work were to blast music from the car stereo by maxing the volume and opening all the doors).
I think the villagers were somewhat amused by us,
as we went out in teams to distribute flyers for the carnival the week before.
Villagers being villagers are always kampong friendly,
i enjoyed the walk around, smiling and playing with the children.
Planning the carnival was hard hard work.
For the last week at least,
we have 12 hour days of getting things done outside and after dinner and shower back home,
it's meetings until we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore past midnight.
Sok son and I were at the bank watching the bankers chit chat during office hours the other day and he commented on how cambodians seem quite free.
"everyone is free except us," i quipped. "We keep working until we fall asleep! i'm even busier than when i was in singapore!"
The carnival was somewhat a success. We only had 5 people, each manning one booth, to entertain 100+ children, with another 3 helpers roaming around to resuscitate any drowning volunteer.
Halfway through the carnival it started raining and we had to stop the games and carry all the tables, props and queue stands (which are really rafia strings tied to chairs) indoors to the 2nd floor.
What an experience it was making 100+ children queue up and wait while some of us hurriedly carried stuff indoors and set up everything in there.
"Who runs carnivals like this?" I was smiling to myself while lugging chairs upstairs.
If you thought that was bad, then what came next is much worse.
Pack 100+ children indoors in a little room with no electricity (and hence no fans), with bad ventilation and what you get is a refugee zone with a lot of noise, very stale air, very humid heat, and an interesting smell of everyone combined.
I literally got a headache upon stepping into the room for the first time.
My hats off to the volunteers who stayed in there the entire time till the end of the carnival.
It was backbreaking work with all the picking of the balls, and under those conditions, i wouldn't blame them for thinking it was torture.
But they did it all with much gung ho-ness and joy.
-----------------------------------------------------
Our school is now finally up and ready to run.
New paints are up, decorations up, furniture and toys have moved in, the road is done, the playground is touched up.
It has definitely come a long way from the beginning.
But more than that it's the new lease of life we've brought to the place.
The building has always been there, donated by a team from australia years back.
But it was an empty shell of a place.
now you often hear the squeals of little children, their smiles, and the team of locals who hang around a lot more.
The local that we'll be eventually handing the school over to loves children.
you can see his enthusiasm when he teaches in class,
in fact some of the children he knows well calls him Papa.
The carnival was an announcement of sorts to the villagers that we were ready to start classes.
A marketing event somewhat.
Tomorrow we're running an official registration day for the parents, where we thought we had to try hard for them to sign up.
Our target is 70 children, and already today we've hit 49.
------------------------------------------------------------
The faces of the children when they play the toys we brought over is precious and priceless.
These are toys the singaporean children may not even want to play with anymore,
like the fishing game and the big lego and drawing board stuff.
but when you see how the cambodian children play with these toys,
you'll understand now why there is so much we can do to share what we have with those who don't.
It's not just the toys.
From a bigger picture, we can share a lot more of our expertise and experiences with these pple who don't have these things through no fault of theirs.
----------------------------------------------------------
the children of the village are truly cute.
cute, simple and shy.
Simply precious.
----------------------------------------------------------
Other interesting things that happened:
1) I just found a higher-than-high beam in the car the other day.
And then i realise my higher-than-high beam is actually the high beam.
which means what i thought was "high beam" is actually my normal lights.
which means what i thought was "normal light" is actually dashboard light = no headlights.
So i've been driving at night with no headlights!
no wonder pple seem so unfriendly and aggressive at night,
they don't give way and they keep staring.
now i know why.
they can't see me!
2) blogspot was supposedly blocked by my internet provider.
so i access my blog using a proxy server by going to another website.
suddenly that website is now blocked.
and before i could go "alamak now i can't read my blog", i found that blogspot is no longer blocked!
--------------------------------------------------------
alrightee, time to sleep.
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