March 2022:Jump In!

JUMP IN!

Heartprint has really been jumping for joy this month! 

For starters, Cambodia re-opened its borders to vaccinated travellers. There are no required Covid tests or quarantine and you can get a visa on arrival again!  First time in two years! This is such great news in general for all of Cambodia so reliant on international travelers and for our small community in particular.  

So much has changed since we were last able to have visitors.  Siem Reap has a whole network of beautiful new roads, riverside gardens and walking paths.  And Heartprint has expanded our programs to allow us to help our community on so many critical levels.

We have two international volunteers arriving in early April to jump right into working with us! We’ll also have two volunteers joining us from Phnom Penh. Let us know if you’d like to jump in with us, too. We have so much going on. For more on how to join us as an intern or volunteer, check out the details.

Five more children in our community learned to literally “jump in” this month: Into the pool to learn to swim. Check them out. These girls live in very conservative communities and their swimwear reflects and respects their culture. With 59 kids in our various programs, we are often asked how we choose the next five. These 5 are the stand-out participants in our morning programs and the swim lessons are their reward. Our goal is to have all 59 know how to swim.

Heartprint’s first two houses for 2022 are finished!  Our building team jumped in and stayed in to get these houses, and toilets built for two families living in extraordinary poverty.  

In Cambodia, the government will sometimes provide a bit of land to a family to build a home if the family has a “poor card.”  Such was the case with both of our families this month.  Except the homes they had managed to cobble together were falling down around them and the lack of sanitation was a danger to their health. 

One family is headed by a 63 year-old widow and mother of 8 children.  Four of them are grown and have moved far away from Siem Reap, but she still has four grown children living with her.  All four are concrete workers, which is occasional, low-paid and sometimes not-paid if the boss is one who realizes he can get away with it. They live day-to-day and hand-to-mouth: the result of the perpetual cycle of extreme poverty that stems from all of the conditions Heartprint is working to alleviate in our community. 

They now have a new Heartprint home and toilet facility.  They can also, of course, access programs at Heartprint.

The second family is a couple with two children, ages seven and one.  Caring for the children makes it hard for the mom to work and the father has a brain injury that sometimes prevents him from working, although he does pick up occasional construction work.  You can often see mom with her baby and older son collecting recyclables along the roads and from garbage piles. 

The parents make sure their young son goes to school because they know it’s the only way forward for him.  The school is a long way from them so we will be providing him with a bike to help make the going a bit easier.  

Their new Heartprint home and toilet will help them live more safely and with greater human dignity as they push their children to learn and grow out of extreme poverty.  

Also new, beginning in April, is our Heartprint trainee program, designed to teach specialized skills to two young people each year.  As with everything we do, its purpose is to help members of our community develop what they need to move out of extreme poverty in a sustainable manner. 

The program will be an annual one for 52 weeks.  One young person will receive training in hospitality, food and beverage.  The other in garden design, building and maintenance. The first two trainees will start with us in mid-April, just after Khmer New Year.  Much more to come on this. 

Finally, we’ve had a bit of a problem with someone attempting to raise money using our Heartprint name.  We only endorse fundraisers registered through Heartprint.  If something feels “off” about a request to you, please get in touch with us directly. 

But if you’d like to jump right in with us now even without coming to Cambodia, we’d love for you to participate in Match it May.  We have one business already on board:  thank you Dickfos Dunn Accountants!  

This is for businesses small, medium, large or X-large!  It can double individual donations to us in May.  Think of all we can do to help more people like the ones we’ve talked about in this newsletter

On that note, Happy Khmer New Year!