September 2022: Books, Music, Rains and Gains
BOOKS, MUSIC, RAINS and GAINS
Do you ever feel the need to just be by yourself?
If you’re lucky, as so many of us are, you can go to another room and shut the door. Or go for a drive or a walk or a movie where you sit in the back row all by yourself, eating popcorn. Even as kids, most of us were able to occasionally shut ourselves off from other people to have time to decompress, reflect, read, and maybe just have a nap.
If you’re not so lucky, you don’t have these options. You live in a house where there is no privacy, much less a room where you alone can shut out the world for a bit. There is constant noise and activity - maybe a bit of chaos. It’s loud and unending at times. Lots of uncertainties. It can be overwhelming, especially for kids dealing with all the ordinary challenges of growing up, exacerbated by the challenges of extreme poverty.
It’s one reason we set aside a quiet space at Heartprint. It’s small and cozy. We call it our library. It does have books - but it also has special powers. Kids can go in, read, write, sleep, think - and come back out rejuvenated enough to face the rest of their day. It’s their room, their own space. They are respectful of it and of each other.
It started out with a small number of books, now well-read and cherished. Generous friends heard about it and started to donate more books. And recently, our inventory of books doubled when Ambassador Pablo Kang dropped by to donate 170 new books from the Australian Embassy in Cambodia.
Books help our kids grow, learn more about the world, and want to be better prepared to engage in it as educated, successful adults. We love their library, their magic space.
There are also times, of course, when our young people are going to be anything but quiet. Remember all the music classes and our promise that a new hot hot video was in production to rock you? Well, here it is. We are proud to busting about this. And just in case you can’t immediately understand all the lyrics they wrote and sing, you can follow along right here:
A newsletter these days would not be a real Heartprint newsletter if it didn’t include talk of monsoon rains. Somedays, it seems they will never go away. This month, with our regular build team and a new group of volunteers starting work on two new homes, the rains were so heavy the build site flooded. We were cut off completely. Heartprint itself didn’t escape the flooding, either, nor did our volunteer house. In fact, much of Siem Reap has been under water throughout the month. But somehow, the sun seems to come out just long enough for our workers to dig back in and get the job done. And so we finally finished Houses #83 and 84! That’s a solid gain!
Finally, we can’t resist relating the progress of our Super Saver program. Kids in our community get tokens for their participation in programs (and have their own little banks at Heartprint where they deposit them to either save or “spend” when we open the super saver Heartprint store). Every so often, we open the store (markers, paper, other little things we used to provide for free, but they now purchase with their tokens), and they can choose to buy or save. If they save, they earn an extra token for their bank account. Call us surprised when we recently opened the store, expecting a mad crush of buyers - and every single child chose to save instead of spend.
That’s a lot of gains. In spite of the rains.
We’ll see you in October! Have a great month.
