November 2022: Dancing with Kindness
Dancing with Kindness
Happy Birthday to us! November marked Heartprint’s seventh year in Siem Reap, and oh! We love seeing how far we have come. We just completed building our 85th home, we now have 75 wonderful young people enrolled in our Community Center programs, our adult programs are thriving, our cafe is bustling, and we keep learning and growing.
November also brought us World Kindness Day. We like every day to be filled with kindness, but this internationally recognized day on the 13th inspired us to tell you a story about how one act of kindness rippled in concentric circles through our community.
It all started with the volunteers who came to help us in September. They raised the funds and worked with us to build houses for two families. One of the homes was for a family that included an Apsara dancer, currently unemployed because our tourism economy is still struggling. When all of the construction was complete and the families could move into their new homes, we realized there was money left over.
Our volunteer group had seen the programs underway in our Community Center and become fond of the families, including the incredibly talented Apsara dancer. They asked if the leftover money could be used to pay her to teach this traditional dance at Heartprint.
And the circles rippled out. We hired her to teach for ten weeks, giving her family some much-needed income. Young people are being immersed in their rich heritage in a tangible way. Music and grace are moving through our Community Center and from there back into the homes of Heartprint families.
The traditional dance of Cambodia, Apsara dates back to the 7th century and reflects both Buddhist and Hindu mythologies. It is very complex, and the training (primarily for girls) starts at a very early age. It demands incredible flexibility, particularly in the hands, where every finger movement has a special meaning.
We value the arts, creativity, and movement as much as we value traditional education and life skills training. We are especially grateful to be able to bring this Apsara dance training - not equally available to all girls - to our Centre.
Our music program is also hopping right now, getting ready for Christmas! Of course, Cambodia is primarily a Buddhist country, but our community does love playing and singing popular Christmas songs, like Jingle Bells. Sometimes it feels like the whole building is rocking with the pounding of multiple keyboards, the shaking of tambourines, and mostly on-key voices raised in song! You can check it out here.
And that leads us to our annual Christmas Giving - a year-end celebration that fills our community space with song and sparkle, laughter, and joy for days on end as we prepare to give gift packages to the children in our community. This may well be the only gift many of these kids receive all year. Last year we distributed 389. Our goal this year is 400. Here’s a link to last year’s party day.
Finally - and we will have much more about this in the coming months - we have a new program called Tiny Tots. We developed programs for the very youngest in our community, bringing the number of young people in our Center to the above-mentioned 75.
We offer them all a place to learn, laugh, listen - and be heard, dance, play, and, sometimes, have a nap. We offer them a chance for a brighter future.
As we grow, so grows our need for financial support. Fund a Future is our first child sponsorship program to connect individual donors with children in our community center programs. For $300 a year - payable weekly, monthly, or all at once - you can help us fund that brighter future for a child. Visit our website for more details.
Happy Holidays! And, as ever, thank you for supporting Heartprint.
PS: On our birthday last year, we told ourselves we wanted to help as many kids as possible learn to swim so we would have no child deaths from accidental drowning in our community. We are so happy to say we were able to see 43 children complete their swimming classes. Thank you! More to come!
