Ramsey Foundation is grateful that - with your help - we've been able to provide hundreds of uniforms, backpacks, school supplies & sandals to Cambodian children over the past few years. In light of this, we couldn’t resist kicking off our Monday morning in Cambodia with a visit to Romchek school so we could meet the students & try our hands at teaching them an English lesson! Little did we know that – in the end – it'd be a toss-up as to who taught whom!
Given our limited time there, we realized that teaching the fundamentals of ABCs & 123s may not be the most ideal approach. This led us to the tried & true route of teaching them to sing “Head, Shoulders Knees & Toes” and “If You’re Happy & You Know it…”. In theory, this little lesson plan sounded ideal; however, in practice, we had a few surprises! The first one was that one of us came down with laryngitis (! ) and the second surprise…..well....you’ll have to watch the video to see how the joke was on us!
As you could tell, we had allot of fun with it anyway! We also managed to fit in alittle "workout" during the next song...
Before closing out our time together, we covered one last significant topic - FRIENDSHIP! While explaining that MTRF was there to help their community by providing access to water & housing supplies for those in need, we also emphasized the value of education & how all of this ties together via friendships. We shared that by caring about others and having a desire to help each other, we can ALL develop strong bonds that make the world a better place!
We illustrated the significance of these friendships by giving “friendship bracelets” to each of the students. We explained that their blue color represented the water that they accessed through the wells & the links on the crocheted bracelets represented bonds that we felt with them. These very simple “gifts” gave us the opportunity to interact with each & every student in a small, yet meaningful way. We captured a few of the students in these very brief videos:
And just as it was time to end our time together, our little teachers had a “gift” for us! They wanted to THANK US with a song of their own! What a lovely & caring way to end our time with them!
MTRF is now doing work in a new village, Leng Dai, and hope to assist their young students with uniforms, backpacks and school supplies. If you’d like to help out, please CLICK HERE.. It is hard to express the delight we felt when - each afternoon - we saw several of these children riding their bikes home from school wearing their MTRF-donated uniforms & backpacks! Luckily, we were able to capture some videos, so be sure to be on the lookout for them in our upcoming “Over the River & Through the Woods” blogpost.