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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The week certainly keeps us going: “Lomurion” (one of our older boys) and I journey into town to collect his specialised prescription glasses. Julie, one of our Directors here, had previously arranged the appointment after long-term problems with his eyes were only brought to our attention recently. Lomurion was delighted at the immediate difference when he tried the glasses on. He was a little bit shy to begin with but this will undoubtedly help his school grades and his confidence once he adapts to wearing them so this is really great news!

Boshra, the other center Director, has let slip it is her birthday this week and quietly tells me she doesn’t want a fuss. I do what any respectable colleague would do with such confidential information and arrange with all the children for to surprise her with a present, cake, candles and singing! The cake went down very well indeed! Happy Birthday Boshra!

We have had quite a few medical challenges this week. As the medicine cupboard is in my room, I am perceived to be the medicine man and this is definitely not the case! However, through having two children, I know how to patch things up from minor bumps and bruises to scrapes and cuts. I know when fevers and other symptoms are a problem and need more investigation. We have had a few malaria cases, diarrhoea, continued ringworm infections, plenty of cuts and scrapes and have even had a couple of hospital appointments scheduled for chest x-rays and chest clinics. You forget how young some of these children are sometimes as one child (Emmanuel, class 3, pictured in the background below) received a nasty head knock and even after treatment, he was shaking and upset for hours. I couldn’t simply send him back to his dorm as I would have with some of the older boys as he needed someone to hold him and be with him while he recovered. I had him camp out in my room for the afternoon while I was online, allowing me to keep check on him.

This highlights the fact that we are still seeking someone for the position for Volunteer Nurse at the children’s centre in Nakuru, Kenya. We also we have a medical sponsorship programme to help fund for supplies, treatments and hospital appointments for over 70 children here. If either the Volunteer Nurse position or the Medical Sponsorship Programme interests you please follow the below links.

http://www.ihfonline.org/volunteering.php

http://www.ihfonline.org/medicalsponsorship.php

The weekend was shaping up to be a great one!

Late on Friday, we had boys clothes donated from a very generous friend of Emily (our local volunteer at the centre) – Thank you Emily and Friends!

Saturday was the best Family Feeling Day yet as we had clear blue skies, the children were up early and busy, the girls were cleaning dorms and all doing their hair outside; the boys had done litter pickups and were all washing their clothes together early in the day for a change!

On Sunday we had a fantastic fun day with the Kenyan Red Cross when 12 volunteers arrived to have a Family Services Day with the children. We had lots of singing, some talks, a karate lesson followed by the most organised lunch I’ve ever seen here. A big thanks to our children (Lomurion and Sharon) for cooking and arranging everything for our visitors. We were delighted to receive gifts of maize, beans, flour and bananas. This was followed by a serious, inter-centre, 6-aside football tournament which the visitors joined in on and had a great time too! I only lasted two games, back to back, in the heat and had to be left abandoned at the side of the pitch. Our volunteer coach, Harrison, thought this was hilarious. I managed to control the entire midfield area and nobody scored against us while I was on the pitch – respect!

When we arrived at the Bali center late on Saturday afternoon, Emelie and Intang led us to have a walk through the village. It is a beautiful village with a beautiful beach.

We planned our up-coming classes on Sunday and held them on Monday. The children are very lovely and naughty. I introduced myself to each class and they remembered my name quickly. During the classes, we helped the director keep order, which let the classes run more efficiently.

We were excited to teach the children alone on Wednesday and we prepared many colourful paper clothes to act as teaching props. We reviewed the names of clothes and colours and introduced sentences beginning with “He/She has…” and “I have…”. We taught them some descriptive vocabulary, introducing words such as “new”, “old”, “big”, and “small”. Some children were a little naughty, but they still could remember the words.

In our spare time, we have a lot of fun together. One of the volunteers bought a guitar here and the children sing songs while he plays the guitar. Emelie and a little girl danced.

A week has nearly gone by so quickly. Although it is exhausting to teach class in the hot weather, we still feel very happy to be able to.

We wish for a wonderful next week.

We arrived in Aceh on the 2nd of June where we started our voluntary days straight away. During the first week, we held classes for the children who came to our centre.We taught them English and about Chinese culture. Students were very interested and enjoyed studying Chinese handwriting.We also made posters to promote a Chinese workshop and Chinese class that we would run later on that week. 

The most interesting experience is a trip we took to Blang Krueng. The children there were very enthusiastic and even though they could not understand us very well, we had a good time together. For the little children, we taught them the names of days and months in English through using a ‘days of the month’ song. The children loved it. Their beautiful voices impressed us a lot.

For the older children, we had conversations with them like friends, rather than a class. We talked about their hometowns, hobbies and dreams. Most of them told us that they want to be teachers. We were moved by their warm hearts. It showed us that although we are  from different countries and we speak different languages, we still have interlinked hearts.

At the end of the week, we went to the beach.The sea is so pure and magnificent. We really love it here, even though the conditions are a little tough.We have really enjoyed ourselves here and all of us love Aceh. This has been a meaningful journey for us. Aceh, the small town, we love you so much.