Another busy week at IHF Nakuru

By Emily, IHF Co-Director Nakuru, Kenya.

This week has been a busy one at the Nakuru Kenya center! We received four more volunteers – Vincent, Adams, Molly and Lina who have arrived to us from China. The volunteers have really engaged all of our children! Some of the exciting activities the volunteers have introduced include; art work, painting, watching movies, sports as well as assisting them with completing their school work. The volunteers have also spent personal time with the children, guiding and counselling them on personal matters and encouraging them to work hard in school. It is an amazing experience to receive volunteers at our center as it puts smiles of every child’s face. Volunteers are encouraged to continue streaming into our IHF Centers.

This week we also received a lot of gifts for our children from well wishers. The gifts included clothing and foods stuffs. We thank the community around the center for being so caring and concerned about the welfare of our children. Sometimes the community comes in to cook for our children and speak to them regarding social matters which is very pleasant. The people around us around us are very compassionate and we thank them for their time and efforts.

Finally we thank our volunteer Gordon who is working so hard to fundraise for the center projects. The good news is that Gordon has already been promised some funds from well wishers and friends which are likely to be sent to the center soon. This is going to be of great assistance to the center’s most urgent projects like roofing the children dormitories, the directors’ block, getting new beddings for our children and renovating our kitchen. Thank you Gordon.

 

Bye as we look forward to another amazing week which is by the door. Thank you.

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A warm life in Bali

By Cheng Zhang, Work-study volunteer at the IHF Bali center

I arrived at the Bali IHF center on the 1^st June 2013. The center has two log cabins and a large, beautiful garden. I  immediately felt warm and peaceful in the beautiful natural surroundings.

After unpacking our things, Pak Agus (our center driver and a very kind man) took us to buy SIM cards and change our money to local currency. As the local people were not used to our strong accents when we spoke English, in the process of buying  sim cards and changing money was quite difficult! Fortunately, the people in Bali are kind and compassionate. They explained the currency to us patiently and taught us how to count the zeroes on the notes.  It was a pleasure to have so many people trying to help me!

 

On Monday, we met the lovely children!

\(≧▽≦)/

Although they can’ t speak too much English,  they were all very happy to see us.  They put us in the middle of the classroom and curiously asked us ‘what’s your name?’.

 

 

I am sure that this will be an unforgettable experience because of the warmness and enthusiasm the people of Bali have already shown me.

Bringing a little piece of China to Banda Aceh

By Raphael and Estelle, Voluntourists at IHF Banda Aceh

A new week has begun! We’ve been continuing our routine tasks, such as teaching English, going to Blang Krueng to hold classes and helping out with some jobs around  the center.

 

We additionally held  a Chinese workshop and a second Chinese language lesson. During the Chinese workshop, we made a short presentation to introduce Chinese culture and spoke about Chinese history, cities, the Beijing Opera, festivals, food and so on. We then taught Chinese paper cutting which everyone picked up very quickly, making beautiful designs. Below is a snowflake that the student cut himself – it is so fantastic that you would not believe it was his first attempt! As you can see, this workshop was really impressive and an amazing experience for us.

In the second Chinese lesson, we gave a mini lecture in Mandarin and reviewed some of the simple Chinese characters we learnt last week. The enthusiasm and passion of the audience impressed us and made us want to tell them everything we knew about Mandarin in the two hours we had available. What’s more, both of the workshop and lesson made us very proud of our country. 

 

On Sunday, we decided to cook the entire days food for the center ourselves. As a result, we had a Chinese lunch and a French dinner. Although the cooking was a quite tiring and troublesome, we still had a lot of fun. Eating what we cooked ourselves was really enjoyable. The chicken and potatoes cooked in a French way were very delicious, we loved it so much!

On Friday, we held our last lesson at the Aceh center. We left the final thirty minutes of  class free for the students to make a poster. They did it earnestly and what they drew was wonderful.

 

This is the end of our volunteering journey. To be honest, two weeks was too short for us and we still think there are a lot of things we could do for this center and for the children. We are not willing to leave at all, as this experience has been unforgettable and will be kept in our minds forever. We are looking forward to coming back here and staying for a longer time if there is another chance to do so.

Mandarin language classes at IHF Jakarta

By Danjing Jiang, Voluntourist at IHF Jakarta center

The Jakarta center is now running Mandarin-speaking class on a daily basis. Although now there are only three students Rian, Nunrul and Amel, all of them are full of energy and enthusiasm.

They can now have simple daily conversations, such as ‘你好’ ’谢谢’ ‘对不起’ ‘饭吃了吗’ etc, and when they go shopping, they know how to bargain ’太贵了，便宜点’.

Sometimes, it’s difficult teaching the students how to pronounce ‘chi’,’qi’,’zai’,’ci’, but they soon figure it out through the use of homophonic English words.

Since the students are very enthusiastic to learn Mandarin, they do a very good job and pick it up quickly. Learning how to write is much more difficult than pronunciation and during every lesson, they spend a lot of time making notes. Their commitment to learning is very encouraging. We are hoping to begin a Chinese writing course from  next month, run by the new Chinese volunteers arriving in Jakarta.

Busy days at the Medan center

By Shijia Yang, Voluntourist at Medan IHF center

During this week, I taught SD-2, SD-5 and junior students English. I have decided that I definitely love them! For the SD-2 and SD-5 students, I taught them the names of basic fruits. They are fast learners but I found that some students’ struggled with pronunciation. I made sure that I repeated words multiple times and encouraged students to repeat each word back to me in a loud voice. The students are very smart and clever. I think that if I  continue to help them, with practice, they will become better and better.

Tina and I gave the junior students listening exercises We found that from the questions asked, only several students in the class were good at understanding spoken english. The other students often misunderstood words of similar pronunciation. This has led us to focus the next several classes on listening and simple grammar.

On Friday afternoon, we performed student recruitment near the center. I found that many families have several children and, due to their poor financial situation, they cannot afford to pay for every child’s study fees. When we handed out leaflets to children, asking them to pass it on to their parents, they were very excited because they want to learn  but school isn’t always an option for them. I hope that more and more children will come to our center to study, I think we could make a big difference to their lives.

Student Recruitment Campaign in Jakarta

By Yang Yingping & Jiang Danjing, Voluntourists at IHF Jakarta center

This Friday, all four volunteers from IHF Jakarta walked around the local area to distribute handouts advertising free classes available through the IHF education center. The handouts were targeting  schoolchildren from poor families. This is the first time we were able to see the very poor people in the area and it was a great shock to us.

At first, we walked behind the center directors and distributed the handouts without saying a word. We soon found that this was not productive as the local people could not completely understand what we were doing and had doubts about taking the handouts from us. This motivated us to learn some basic Indonesian terms, such as ‘free course’ ‘thank you’ and ‘English class’. Being able to speak these basic phrases helped us greatly and we were able to do a much better job at attracting many parents and children.

During the day of distributing handouts, we saw many poor families who lived in very narrow living spaces. They were unable to provide their kids with education due to their limited income. By seeing the children’s happy faces, we felt delighted and reassured that we were doing the right thing.

This Sunday is Jakarta center’s registration day and we found that we had lots of new students. We played many games which were very fun, including donut eating, musical chairs and vocabulary guessing.

The children had a lot of enthusiasm when playing the games and all of them received gifts as a reward for the good job they did.