SMALL STEPS NURSERY PROJECT AT LUC FUNDED BY SCOTT DUNN

After 3 years of working on the Sihanoukville dump and getting to know the community it became obvious to SSP that one of the most difficult groups to help were the younger children, babies and those not at school. The dump poses the most danger to these vulnerable children, as for babies and their developing lungs the toxic smoke is incredibly dangerous.

Approximately half the families and scavengers on the dump do not live there permanently, we identified that the most high risk group on the dump were those families that had no access to any alternative accommodation and lived permanently on the dump. It was this high-risk group that we were focused on helping first. Most of those families had very young children, toddlers and babies. Though there was a centre for some of the children (who we worked with last year) that was for children over 6 years old.

It was clear that what was needed was off-site access to facilities, hygiene, education and food for the younger children. Prior to leaving for Cambodia last summer, I met with Scott Dunn Travel and shared our insights and plans to assist this high risk group and they generously funded the nursery provision which we have set up with our in country partner project Let Us Create.  

So in January this year work began to create an early years provision within the Let Us Create Centre. We also brought in our nursery nurse, Paula, to set up the early years procedure and train the current Cambodian staff.

Once it was ready we held an open day for the parents and are pleased that several of the mothers with babies now also attend the centre.  (Watch this space for the Mum’s Project).  To subsidize the income of the families, from the wage lost by their children ceasing to scavenge, we provided a rice fund to all the families whose children attend.

But how would we transport the children from the dump to the centre? Not only did we receive funding from Scott Dunn but also from First Mile recycling who helped us purchase a mini van for the outreach project. The outreach consists of collecting all the high-risk children and some of the mums 6 days a week and bringing them to the centre. Then all of the under 6 years olds and mums go to the new nursery and the few older children jointhe classes and art activities in the main centre.

We have now employed a social worker, Sokha, a driver, Dina, and fund the salary of one of the nursery nurses in the centre part fund and the Head Social Worker of LUC, Bunly. There are two nursery nurses, Sengkea and Ho, who care for the existing LUC little ones and the dump children.  Sengkea, whose role is now funded by Small Steps Preoject said of the nursery, ''It is amazing to see that the children from the rubbish dump pick up the pre-school lessons in the nursery so fast!''.

This is really the most fantastic step because as well as providing the aid that the children need to be able to leave the dump we now provide them with a choice, an alternative place to be.

The nursery nurses are fantastic and the children adore them, but what is incredible is how most of them have responded to being in the centre and in class. Considering that none of them have ever been in school or had rules, they were able to get stuck in with story time and registers and lining up for lunch like all the other children, in fact, once they are cleaned up and in new clothes it is impossible to tell them apart from the other children.

We are so happy to be able to provide these high-risk children with an alternative to scavenging on the rubbish dump.

Unlike our previous projects, this one is sustainable, it gets the children of the dump every day and that is why we need your continued support and donations so that we can ensure the longevity of this project.

We would like to thank Scott Dunn and First Mile for their incredible support, helping us to make our ideas a reality and enabling us to set up these provisions. And we would like to thank our in country partner project Let Us Create for sharing their space and skills with SSP and enabling so many children on the dump to experience a safe and happy place where they can have the right to a childhood.

SMALL STEPS' SUSTAINABLE OUTREACH PROJECT WITH LET US CREATE

CEO Amy Hanson with LUC Director JB & outreach kids

At Small Steps Project we have embarked upon our first sustainable project with the dump community in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. We’ve been delivering shoes there for three years, and now, with our new outreach project, in collaboration with NGO Let us Create, we are getting the children off the dump every day.

SSP & LUC Crew by their new outreach van

Last year we found our partner project and made a short film, Next Steps, about what we wanted to do for the future of this dump community.  

Together, this year, we are collecting the children and some of the mums from the dump each day in our new Small Steps Project Outreach mini van.  Thanks to our partnership with LUC we now have a fantastic centre to which we can bring the children, where they receive two meals a day, have hygiene education and cleaning, fresh clothes, education, art therapy and fun! 

CEO Amy Hanson works with kids off the dump 

Within the centre children can attend the nursery and benefit from the Nutrition project and hygiene projects. These SSP & LUC collaborative projects improve the health of both the dump children and the existing children at the centre.  

 Both SSP and LUC help children who scavenge for survival: SSP helping children from the dump, and LUC helping children who scavenge the streets to survive. Both our organizations believe strongly that children should not be collecting or sorting waste; it is bad for their health and development and dangerous.  However, their poverty means that they have no choice. So we are trying to offer them an alternative to scavenging.

Free play under the SSP sign

 Our next steps are to create training and education opportunities for the mums as well - many of whom are interested in training as cooks or in child care, for which we will easily be able to offer training at the centre. By finding the parents alternative work, we can also help relocate whole families away from rubbish dumps.

We have been blown away by how well all the children have mixed; the older LUC kids helping the younger dump kids and the older dump kids looking out for the little ones at LUC.  

The dump kids after their showers in the fresh clothes

By breaking down the project into different areas: outreach, early years, nutrition, hygiene and education & training we hope to attract further funding, to ensure that what we have set up will last.

That is where you can help, by continuing to donate to SSP or directly to the centre here.

Until now SSP has been too small to accept the many offers of help from volunteers and we discourage dump sight seeing. But together with LUC we now have a program where volunteers can work with the children in a safe environment.  Please contact us here if you are interested in volunteering.

We would like to thank some of our corporate donors who have made our ideas a reality: Scott Dunn, First Mile, whose funding made the outreach possible and enabled us to buy a minivan to get the children off the dump,Optibac and Solgar and Malasia Airlines.

If you work for a company that is interested in supporting our work in health and hygiene, education, recycling, nutrition and child development please recommend and use us for your nominated charity.

You can donate yourself, or consider setting up a regular donation to ensure the sustainability of these projects. Please share this information on Facebook and Twitter, tell all your friends, families and colleagues about a small charity that makes a big difference and which ensures that the money goes directly to those who need it most. 

What can we make with this string?

Masks!

The LUC kids teach the dump kids hygiene education

 

We will be doing a blog on every aspect of the project as well as a photo album to illustrate exactly what we have done so watch this space.  In the meantime, find out how our partnership began and watch our short documentary, Next Steps. 

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Nutrition Project

One of the great things about collaborative projects is that more children can benefit from the services we provide.  Our in-country partner project is the fantastic Let Us Create (formerly The Cambodian Children’s Painting Project). Which provides care to some of the most vulnerable scavenger children from the streets and beaches of Sihanoukville Cambodia.

Together we deliver the Small Steps Outreach Project, where, thanks to the partnership with Let Us Create (CCPP) the dump children have a safe place to come and receive help outside the dangerous environment of the rubbish dump.

We will be keeping you up to date on all the aspects of the dump outreach project every step of the way.  As we have worked on this same dump several times, they all have shoes so now it’s time to take the next small steps.

At the centre we can focus on the key elements of growth that are missing from the lives of the children we care for, and a major one, is of course, nutrition.

As the meals that these children receive with us may be the only sustainable meal they eat that day, it is really important to make them have a greater health impact.  Many of the children are malnourished and are affected by stunting along with poor immune systems, which has led to the start of a nutrition project.

Thanks to the generous donations from Solgar, who provided vitamins and Optibac who provided probiotics we had exactly the vitamins and supplements these children were desperate for.  We also were able to bring large quantities due to being given excess baggage from Malaysia Airlines.

But scavenger children and children in the west are the same- they don’t like taking medicines or vitamins or food supplements, why would they? They are children!

That is when Leah Kidd, the inspirational co director at Let Us Create (CCPP) came up with a plan- The Breakfast Club that offers fruit smoothies, with particular emphasis on Papaya due to its excellent source of vitamin C as well as a good source of vitamin E and vitamin A, three very powerful antioxidants along with bananas which help form a protective barrier against stomach acids and they can also diminish the uncomfortable effects of diarrhea and constipation.

We bought some of the biggest blenders we could find, got all the children their new brightly coloured smoothie mugs and set to work.

They absolutely love the shakes and not only are they getting a great source of potassium, vitamin A, vitamin C and vitamin E but also calcium from the milk we add to the smoothies and of course the probiotics.

We are so happy with the Breakfast Club, being able to offer the kids something that, to them is a treat and to us is a great way of making sure they are getting fantastic nutrition and extra supplements to nourish and improve their immune system.

We are really keen to keep improving the health of all the children from the dump and those scavenging in town, so if you are a company reading this and have something that you could donate on a regular basis that would improve the lives and nutrition of these children please get in contact.  Visit our Corporate Partners Page to see which other companies have taken a small step and made a big difference.

 

Shoes and Clothing delivery to Romania

Whilst researching the many dumps around the world we came across several in Romania. We were really shocked to hear that children were living as scavengers so close to home. We found out about the dumps, feral and scavenger children through the work of humanitarian film maker and photographer Richard James Feaver. 

Feaver put us in contact with the charity with who he works closely with, Love Life Romania which supports children in extreme poverty, including scavengers and those on dumps, children that live in sewers and children suffering from HIV.

As the cold was fast approaching we sent all the shoes and clothes that we had been collecting in London as well as donations from Kidderminster Footwear to Love Light Romania and Jo Jowett the director there distributed all the aid in time for Christmas to those children most in need of some shoes and clothes.

Richard Feaver was there to document the delivery too and you can see his images in our gallery and below in the slideshow.

We are really glad to have met Richard and Jo and are so impressed with the work they are doing in Romania and happy to have been able to send them aid they needed. So thanks to everyone who donated items. You will notice that in some of the photos there are wood burning heaters- these were provided for all the families that Love Light Romania supports to fend of he freezing winter.

It is really great to partner with and support other projects that have the same goals and help the same sort of children that we do and we are really looking forward to taking our next step later in the year to help even more children in Romania. 

Paula's Story

I've done this before a few times... I know it's called Amy's blog but Amy (me) is in freezing London right now finishing off some vital fundraisng and, though Coldplay donating us three framed platinum discs (two sold for over £700!) and Oliver Thornton auctioning the Priscilla Queen of The Desert script (which sold for £1500!) is raising us lots of money... I can only be in one place at one time, so thank goodness for my amazing volunteers who are working hard buying shoes for children as soon as we are selling the celebrity variety over here in Blighty.

So this blog is about Paula Harper, a brilliant volunteer, who started working for the project as a celebrity shoe hunter, she managed to procure some pretty good ones too, such as Morgan Freeman's!

Not only did she get lots of the shoes for the charity but on the night of the event she then bought back Simon Pegg's star wars trainers in the auction. She then started a Just Giving page, to which she donated the equivalent of what she had raised £350 out of her own pocket.

So by night Paula is a fundraiser for the charity in the UK and in the day? She is a nursery nurse in Crouch End North London. And what luck is that, because our next step is to start setting up nurseries and child care provisions for dump children and for parent scavengers to leave their children in a safe place.

So straight after the event, Paula flew to Cambodia to start researching nurseries and of course give out shoes. We sent her to the ODA project, which is a great organisation for vulnerable and disabled children in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The director, Leng not only runs this centre but he also does outreach to the six surrounding free schools in very rural and poor areas and he actually built and funded the schools too.

To match the ODA's uniform campaign; providing all the children with new uniforms, Small Steps Project provided all the shoes to over 300 children and Paula was there to size them, buy them and give them out.

But her training was to set up a nursery provsion and visit the Anlong Pi dump nursery so that she would have a wealth of knowledge and skills for when we start our nursery provsions at the Let Us create Centre and the Sihanoukville Dump in the new year.

But when Paula went off to visit the four schools she discovered that there were also four nurseries too, set up by ODA and they were quite basic with not much in the way of materials. So not only did Paula kit them all out with new equiplment but provided them with a routine and structure for them to follow.

So in only six weeks the wonder volunteer has kitted out all the nurseries with new equipment and routine to follow and a structured nursery session for the staff to follow and given out over 300 pairs of shoes. What a success! Paula has also funded her own trip.

So then next step for us is our partnership with LUC, a centre that provides a place base, food, medical care and art therapy to street children and scavengers. It is LUC with who we deliver our weekly outreach project to the 40 children on Sihanoukville dump with and where we will be setting up a nursery and a creche and running those provsions will, of course, be Paula.

Then we want to either bring the dump children to the centre or rent/build a provsion closer to the dump community for the babies and children there. We had raised enough money for the outreach project and to set up nurseries in already existing centres- but our own centre? Well that was a dream that we were continuing to fundraise for- until last week when something amazing happened...

I went to meet with a sponsor of the charity, Scott Dunn travel. I told them all about Paula and the nurseries and how important they are.

If you say to a scavenger parent- why do you bring your children here? It is so dangerous! They always say- what choice do I have? Well that is what we want to offer, a choice and an alternative to being on a rubbish dump. I told Scott Dunn this and they have donated £20,000 to the charity so that we can create these provisions and a centre. So it's not a dream anymore, it's a reality, now we really can take our next steps and start getting children off dumps and into education and give them choices they never had before.

Clare Gates from Scott Dunn explained why they want to help us do this: ‘At Scott Dunn we believe that all children enjoy the same simple pleasures, and given a space where they can make new friends, learn new skills and explore their imaginations, they can have experiences they will remember.  This is true for the children who use our kids clubs on their holidays and through the donation we have made to Small Steps we hope it can be true for the children who live on the rubbish dumps of Cambodia.’

So massive thankyou to Paula for sharing her knowledge and taking a bit of Crouch End to Cambodia and to Scott Dunn for funding our dreams and the childrens improved futures.

Paula has her own blog so if you would like to read in more detail about her volunteering please visit her blog

She is also has a Just Giving page so if you would like to support Paula please donate to her page, all the money raised on Paula's page will go directly into the projects that Paula is delivering.