Basic Needs

 Dear Friends,

We are now back in Canada. As many of you know K.I.D.S. has been helping support families of the poorest children that are in our education programs during the COVID crisis. Many of the families were living on next to nothing due to the shut down of factories, shops, restaurants, sales of rice, and other means of employment. Each month we have been supporting about 700 people by buying them the basics…50 kilos of rice, cooking oil, fish sauce, soap, noodles, and fish and giving them a little cash to help with needed medicine.

We met with all the families and helped deliver food in different areas where we have K.I.D.S. education programs. In two of the areas, the families came to the schools on a Sunday to pick up their much-needed supplies and in another area, we went and delivered the supplies to their houses.

As we addressed all the families we told them that thanks to the kindness of others that support K.I.D.S. we have been able to assist them through these incredibly difficult times. Needless to say, the families expressed their sincere heartfelt appreciation for everyone’s support. It was both heartbreaking and heartwarming to meet the families and know how hard they have had to struggle and yet they were smiling and not complaining about their situations, making the best of what has happened to them as well as helping each other.

The good news is that the factories and other places of employment, as well as the sale of rice, fish and other agricultural products, are slowly coming back. KIDS is now reducing our support as these families get back on their feet. We cannot thank you enough for reaching across the globe to assist those in need.

Wishing you and yours all the very best,

Adrianne and Rick

Computers for Better Futures

 Hello Everyone,

We are going to the airport to fly home from Cambodia tonight. We have more stories and projects to write about during our 11 weeks here and will send more updates when we get home. Thank you friends and donors for all of your support that makes the work that K.I.D.S. does possible.

Below is our latest post!!
Rick and Adrianne

Dear Friends,

We hope this finds you well. Supporting education is a pivotal part of K.I.D.S. and having access to technology is pivotal to education in this day and age. IT skills play an essential role in teaching, researching and learning.

In the past five years, we have visited high schools with as many as five to six thousand students and no computers; even though they have teachers trained to teach computer skills, the schools cannot afford them. Each year, with the support of KIDS donors, we purchase computers for schools and training programs. Now computer classes run daily, allowing hundreds of students to learn these essential skills.

During this trip, we have been able to purchase more computers for students at schools as well as computers for teachers so they can use them to prepare courses, do research, and keep attendance and marks. The teachers share the computers for different subject areas.

We also provide computer labs for after school training in more isolated rural and poor city slum areas.

It has been great to visit the schools and see everyone learning, and we know that these skills will help change their futures and give them more opportunities in their lives.

As always, we thank you for bringing technology to young people.
Wishing you and yours all the very best,

Adrianne and Rick

Tuk Sa-at (Beautiful water)

Hello Everyone,

We hope you and yours are doing well and that life is getting back to a sense of normal. Here in Cambodia things are slowly opening up, which is very much needed. We had the great pleasure of spending a couple of days visiting a number of clean drinking water projects KIDS has built over the past couple of years, in rural communities. This past year, thanks to K.I.D.S. donors’ support, we were able to bring three schools and villages the gift of clean drinking water.

As many of you know clean drinking water is a huge issue in Cambodia. Even in our small apartment we have to buy our drinking water and cannot just drink it out of the tap. Although for us this is not expensive to buy, for those living in poverty it becomes a huge expense and many families end up drinking contaminated water from hand-dug wells or ponds. Children miss school from illness and are more lethargic due to ongoing diarrhoea.

Each year we bring clean drinking water to schools and communities, so children and teachers have free access to the water and the community members can also bring containers to take clean water home for drinking.

As we visited the schools we were met by the school principals, commune leaders, and students who expressed their gratitude for helping their school and community.

While meeting with the school administrators it was a pleasure to watch the students freely filling their water bottles. We also ensure that the filtration systems are kept up and that anything that is not working is replaced or upgraded.

Over the years we have brought clean drinking water to thousands of students and their families and improved their health, thanks to your support and thanks to our friend and logistician Kim Thol and a great team of water technicians and builders. Thank you for your continued support in bringing this life-saving resource to children and families.

We will close with a Slovakian Proverb, that is so true:

"Pure water is the world's first and foremost medicine."

All the very best to you and yours,
Until Next time,
Adrianne and Rick

A Dream Come True

 Dear Friends,

We hope all is well with you and yours. One of the more difficult experiences we have here in Cambodia is doing homes visits to the families of students that are in our Smart Kids education program, in a very poor brick factory area. Many of the families we visit need decent housing. The conditions they live in are incredibly sad, with dirt floors, inferior walls, and leaky roofs.

Each year we decide who and how many families we can build new houses for. The principal of the primary school and K.I.D.S. Smart Kids English teacher/ manager decide which families are in the most desperate need. This past year we were able to build 5 houses for families.

This year one of the families we visited is a grandmother, who is 68 years old and has lived most of her life in the brick factory, in a shack, where she still works carrying and making bricks to this day. Her husband died many years ago and she is raising her grandson while her only daughter works in another town for poor wages to help the family. If you work and live in the brick factory you cannot build a new house, as the factory houses workers in very poor conditions and charges them to live there. Over the years the daughter and grandmother scraped together enough money to buy a small lot of land outside the factory but cannot afford to build on it for several more years, if ever. Thanks to the kindness of KIDS donors we are going to be able to build a house for this hardworking woman, her daughter and her grandson. This past year we also helped them with a stipend and food as the brick factories were closed for quite a while during Covid

We visited some other families we are able to build houses for. While we build the houses they often live basically outside, under a tarp, but they never complain because they are so happy to have a new home. We have a great team of local builders and thanks to K.I.D.S. they have been able to work through most of Covid.

Your generosity and support have changed many families' lives forever, by giving them a decent house to call HOME.

Take Care and all the very best to you and yours,
Until Next Time,
Adrianne and Rick

Girls Taking Flight

 Dear Friends,

Today is International Women's Day, a day we recognize the achievements of women and how far they have come in the fight for their rights within the political, cultural, and social spheres. It is also a day to recognize how hard women have worked to overcome, abuse, poverty, gender inequality and to honour how they have worked tirelessly to break the cycle of poverty and strive for a better future.

Bringing education to girls and young women is essential to breaking the cycle of poverty. K.I.D.S. has helped many girls and young women to get an education through our K.I.D.S. Education Programs and supported them with post-secondary education. Most of the mothers of the girls we have supported, over the years, have never had the opportunity to go past primary school if they even had the chance to go to school at all, many are illiterate.

Phai and Sophorn grew up in orphanages and came to live at K.I.D.S home for girls when they were young. They are sisters and are now in their last year of university, they have both held good jobs while going to school. They are happy and their futures are bright! 

We met Vanna many years ago. He is a landmine victim and until Covid sold books on the streets of Siem Reap, his wife hand-washed laundry to help support their two daughters. K.I.D.S. has helped his daughters with their education and this year it was a happy day for the family when we registered the twins for accounting college. In the future, they will help their parents and ease their difficult lives.

All the girls we have supported through K.I.D.S. education programs have worked very hard and never taken their education for granted. They know that this is their opportunity to break free of a life of toil and hardship.

Sara and Yen are two of many girls and young young women who are in our Smart Kids education program. Their parents work very hard laboring in brick factories for very poor wages. They had already started working as young girl's till K.I.D.S. sponsored them for primary school, high school a vocational training program and now for university business management. They would be illiterate and more than likely be mothers few times over by their early twenties but not for your generosity and support.

These are just a few examples of how collectively we have brought education to girls and women. Over the years we have witnessed the difference we have all made in the futures of these girls. It is heartwarming to hear and see them becoming teachers, managing restaurants, working in companies and now having of their own children by choice.

This picture was drawn by one of the girls in K.I.D.S. Farm School education program, it was on the wall of the classroom under the teacher’s house where 60 kids come to study English each evening. Thank you for making many girls' dreams of education come true and helping girl's and women take flight through education.

Until Next Time,

Adrianne and Rick

Classrooms for kids from K.I.D.S.

 Dear Friends,

We hope all is well with you and yours. We recently had the pleasure to be able to visit the kids at Wat Sela school and see them happily studying and learning in the new classrooms that K.I.D.S. was able to build over this past year.

When we were here last, we often met students in our Smart Kids English Education program in an old run-down wooden classroom.

The principal, Mr. Sokha, and K.I.D.S. Smart Kids program manager Hak were telling us that the school was overcrowded and that they could really use more classrooms and a library so more children could attend school and children could have a place to read books at their pleasure.

We had the old school torn down and hired the local builders we always use to build three new classrooms.

It was so heartwarming to visit the kids in the new classrooms and see them studying and reading books in the new library.

Now more children can work at getting an education rather than having to labour in brick factories. Education changes lives forever and builds better futures. Thanks for making this dream come true for the teachers and the students!!!

Until next time,
Adrianne and Rick

Back in the Saddle

 Dear Friends,

We hope that you are well.

Not sure how many of you know that we have returned to Cambodia, we had a good but tiring trip here and managed to test negative through the PCR test, rapid test on arrival, and after a voluntary 5-day quarantine, another negative rapid test on our own to make sure we were not a threat the people of Cambodia and our friends due to covid.

We have been working post quarantine for 10 days and have connected with many friends, families, kids and contacts here. K.I.D.S. work has continued throughout the pandemic with infrastructure projects, ongoing programs, and helping families with food and supplies to survive, which we will update you on soon. It has been great for us to get back in the saddle, so to speak, and to put students back in the saddle…of bikes that assist them to have easier access to schools and education.

We have purchased 180 bikes this past week and delivered half of them with the rest to be put in the hands of students in the coming days.

A bike is a key component of a Cambodian student's access to education, which is dependent on having a bicycle due to the distance from school. We purchase reconditioned second-hand bikes from Japan. These one-speed bikes are real workhorses for Cambodians not only for students to get to school but for going to market, work or transporting just about anything it seems. Over the years we have met many students and adults who never had access to education because the $70 cost of a bike was too much for the family to bear.

We have also started to deliver school supplies to students at a few schools. The budgets at schools for notebooks, pens and other school supplies are very limited in the rural areas and for poor families, the purchase of school materials is often difficult to achieve. So students and teachers are always happy to receive any materials that K.I.D.S. can supply.

Thank you for your donations and for extending kindness to these students to help them access education.

Till next time,
Rick and Adrianne