From July 2004 to June 2007 I lived and taught in Cambodia.
During this time I did weekend volunteer work at the Centre For Children's Happiness.
The Center for Children's Happiness (CCH) orphanages provide a home and
education to Cambodian children. The children are either orphans or belong to parents who cannot
take care of them due to illness, disability, or poverty. Most of the children previously worked as garbage pickers at the Steung Mean Chey
landfill in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
To find out more about the orphange visit the following website http://www.cchcambodia.org/
or click on the CCH tab at the top of this blog.
Whilst I was in Cambodia I was involved in a number of fundraising ventures for the orphanage. Whenever I was back in the UK my family and I raised money through car boot sales. Here you can see my mum meeting the children she had helped raise money for.
The money brought tables for children to work at outside and shade was provided by a friends company.
Another round of fundraising provided a plastic storage container for each child to keep their change of clothes and school books in, protecting them from the monsoon rains.
After visiting CCH a close friend raised enough money through her school in the UK to buy 2 tuk tuks to allow the children to go out on day trips and also provide an opportunity for the older teenagers to earn some money.
When I moved to New Zealand and started teaching at Nelson Central School I had the idea of continuing to help CCH and to help our children become more aware of what is happening to many less fortunate children around the globe.......this is how Food For Thought came about. This venture helps our children at Nelson Central to be more aware of human rights and of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
All the money raised goes directly to the orphanage supporting the children to have a better life and a better education. We are in regular contact with CCH and they send us emails and photos so that we can see what the money we have raised is being used for. We have even had some of our school community visit the orphanage whilst on holiday in Asia.
Our annual Food For Thought sponsor takes part in August each year and is supported by an increasing number of families. Other children from Nelson Central School have held their own fundraising events e.g. selling home made jams and this money has also been sent over to the orphanage.
Check out the rest of this blog to find out more about what we are doing. If you have any new ideas, questions or stories about our Food For Thought fundraising please leave us a comment.
Thank you so much to everyone who has encouraged and supported me in getting this idea up and running and an enormous thank you to all the families that have taken part to help give the CCH children a better quality of life.
Tracy
