Foster Children Program in Kratie (WFWP Cambodia)

WFWP Cambodia has a foster children program in three provinces: Takeo, Prey Veng and Kratie. This time we visited Kratie, the commune where our 37 foster children live, crossing the Mekong River.

Instead of just distributing supporting money, we always aim to conduct activities to cultivate children's writing ability, expressiveness and creativity. It's our hope and mission to foster good citizens who can contribute to and lead society and the nation well. In July we played 3 kinds of word games as a practice to develop depictive and creative abilities.

The first was a game of guessing the names of things in team opposition, among each grade. One team describes and explains something little by little. The other team guesses what it is from those hints. We encouraged each one of the team members to think of a hint in turn so that only certain individuals would not always speak.

The second was a game in which one draws a few cards from a pack of word cards and creates sentences that contain all those words. We prepared a variety of words including adjectives, onomatopoeia, names of animals not found locally, etc. At first, the children were at a loss wondering "what kind of sentences could be made with these words!?" but eventually they seemed to enjoy the game, with lots of laughter, making up sentences that would not happen in reality. After that, they chose one of the sentences they made and drew a picture of it. This was the preparation for the third game.

When everyone finished drawing, we divided them into teams again and let each team exchange the drawings the team members had drawn. That is, each team got several sheets of drawings with no knowledge of the backgrounds of those. We asked children to combine those drawings to create a whole new story. Here again, they were lost. But everyone, as a team tried hard to come up with ideas and all teams were able to successfully make exciting stories.

All these activities were new and a bit difficult for those who live in the rural area at first glance. Still, we expect that this will become another opportunity for them to learn new ways of thinking and to see things differently.

Support money is usually given to each child after activities like the above; however, this time there was a local event for the entire commune on the following day, and we handed out the support money to our foster children during that event. More than 400 residents gathered, including the Deputy Minister and senior officials from the Ministry of Civil Service, to which WFWP Cambodia has an MoU, as well as the district governor also came to the event to deliver speeches. We are grateful that our foster children program was widely recognized on that occasion.