Experience with VSO-ICS

 
I. Introduction to the Volunteering Sub Team –
Our volunteering sub-team was the smallest group, comprising of two UK and three Khmer volunteers. We concluded with some overarching objectives based on results gathered from our Training Needs Assessment. We wanted to promote the benefits of volunteering, raising awareness and peer education. We then thought our main sessions should run with the themes of volunteering for employability, local advocacy, the importance of learning from others and the environment. Topics such as these would inform the youth about contentious global issues with a particular focus on how they affect Cambodia. We also wanted the activities we planned around these to encourage the development of soft skills such as teamwork, leadership and confidence. Our team also aimed for our sessions to lead to tangible results that would benefit the wider community, such as improved school library facilities and an increased awareness of volunteering opportunities. Due to our limited time to work within the community, we wanted to concentrate on establishing our presence and raising awareness in the hope that we could interest and educate groups of like-minded and committed students with which the next cycle could work with to make a lasting and sustainable difference.

II. Achievements –
a. As a team, we felt that our strong work ethic and group cohesion was the main contributing factor towards our success. As previously mentioned, we held regular sub-team meetings to discuss progress with individual tasks, consolidate our understanding and revise our weekly plan. We learnt that it was imperative to plan our school sessions and workshops together, not only to incorporate cross-cultural ideas, but also to prevent miscommunication from the start. Once a lesson plan was typed up and translated, we would then talk through it before we delivered it to avoid silly errors and to maximise the effect of our time with the students. For us, this was definitely the most effective and enjoyable way to work and it certainly led to the most rewarding results.

b. Leading on from this, we used the findings from our TNA report to create the content for our sessions, so that they would directly help the students who requested them. Planning them this way, rather imposing pre-prepared sessions on them was far more effective in increasing sustained participation and engagement. It also meant that we could tailor each session to specific schools and age groups.

c. We would also recommend preparing a summative leaflet to accompany each informative session that you do as students gave us really positive feedback for this. Although it may seem like a waste of paper, we found that it helped prompt our Khmer volunteers, provided notes that the students could take home and research further, and encouraged volunteers to read aloud within the class. We only made them A5 and very concise but found them to be much more effective than an e-mail attachment as many students didn’t have access to computers. They proved to be extremely valuable for our benefits of volunteering session, especially at KCIT. Leading on from the options we had made them aware of, students were able to research and aspire to apply for international university scholarships, something we could not have discussed had we not done prior research.

d. We really enjoyed our sign-making session at Prasat Sambour, we felt it was the most enjoyable and successful session. We would recommend doing something like this at the start of your placement if possible, as it was easy to organise and a great way for all volunteers to interact with the students. We wanted the session to be student-led, so we asked the students to choose colour schemes and the slogans and they then painted them with our supervision. It was so lovely to spend the day with them and they found time to practice their English and teach us traditional dancing! The signs looked a lot better than we had hoped and it was so rewarding to see how proud the children were of what they had made.

II.1 Ta Ouk High School -
II.1.1 Action Research - ‘The TNA was conducted with most of the secondary school at the discretion of the director. Organisation may be a challenging factor at this school, particularly as a Youth Council has not yet been established. The students requested a study club which we hope to establish on Saturday afternoons where children from any grade will be welcome. We hope to initially set up this club to deliver our awareness raising sessions so that it will continue and the next cycle will be able to lead conversational English lessons here. A further suggestion from the school director provided a premise for our Community Action Day. He wants to reduce rubbish in the school, tidy the school environment, plant flowers and raise awareness of sustainable waste disposal and climate change. To maximise our impact we now need to prioritise the most important things that we can do during the rest of the time here in the hope the next cycle will work on some of our other ideas in a bid to make our plan as sustainable as possible.’ - Taken from our TNA Report, Feb 2019.

Regretfully, we could not establish an effective relationship with Ta Ouk, the school we felt was most in need of our help. As seen from our initial TNA report, we had many promising ideas based on the results from student surveys collected, but despite our best efforts, communication with the school broke down towards the end of our placement. Perhaps this was indicative from the start, as the director called an ad hoc meeting with students so that we could carry out our TNA instead of addressing them previously to find out who was interested in the project, which would have been more sustainable from the start.

II.1.2 Peer Education - Unfortunately, we were not able to run our peer education session due to poor attendance. We were very disheartened as we felt this session would have been most beneficial to the students here, particularly considering that the Youth Council was not effective due to mismanagement and lack of students’ mutual respect for one another.

II.1.3 Community Network - Despite our best efforts, the community networks we established with this school weren’t very effective. We contacted the school director on multiple occasions to confirm our schedule and as time went on, to query why the students were not attending our sessions. We also used our Facebook page, Prasat Sambour Youth Volunteering, to contact the students directly as this had proved more successful at other schools. Although we tried each avenue of contact multiple times and asked our Khmer Team Leader to help us, we still only had three students who attended 2/4 sessions. The director seemed very complacent especially seeing as there was other charities affiliated with the school. We spoke to the English teacher there who is a long-term volunteer. He was our most insightful point of contact. From him we were able to find out that students were also not attending his classes, so we shouldn’t be too discouraged. It also didn’t help that this school was the furthest away from the office, so all transport had to be pre-arranged. In future, we would recommend having a sit-down meeting with the director and the English teacher if possible at the start of your placement to discuss further action and how you can get the students to attend.

II.1.4 Awareness Raising - Our introductory session was to promote volunteering to young people, including how it could benefit the individual and the community. We focused our session around discussion and interactive games to keep the students engaged, as well as being a really good opportunity for the UK volunteers to get involved too. We also prepared a leaflet on volunteering and scholarship opportunities regionally, nationally and internationally. Only three students attended, but in a way this was better, as we were able to focus more attention onto them and their aspirations. We also organised a litter pick and environmental awareness day here based on the suggestions from director. Although over 50 students attended, many left early because of the hot weather and a pre-scheduled village celebration that we were not informed about. Honestly, the litter pick proved to be futile because students just emptied the bin bags in the fire pits to be burnt which directly contradicted our presentation on the sustainable and safe disposal of rubbish, or the alternative of selling it for a profit. We understood that this is because they really have no other option in Cambodia. Even the charity we contacted to help us (GAEA Clean Green Cambodia) have had to suspend projects due to lack of support. Although it encourages participation, we would strongly advise against litter picks here!

II.1.5 Training - For the reasons mentioned above, no training of any kind from volunteering team was able to take place.

II.1.6 Resource Development - Although it may seem unnecessary, we strongly recommend reading our TNA Report, or this document thoroughly at a minimum! We worked really hard on prospective ideas directly from the students suggestions, which we hoped would be sustainable. We just weren’t able to carry them out due to time spent having to establish the project and introduce it to the community. We would especially recommend following the director’s suggestion of planting and cultivating flowers. Unfortunately we were not able to do this due to poor attendance, the dry season and the fact that our time here coincided with the end of the school term and Khmer New Year.


II.2 KCIT institute:
II.2.1 Action Research - ‘We conducted our final TNA with around 50 students from KCIT. A key finding was that they felt they hadn’t been provided with enough information about volunteering opportunities in the past. The students suggested that the most effective way of distributing future information about volunteering opportunities would be through the Youth Council, so we will work alongside them to set up an opportunities board in the library and promote our Facebook page. Unlike the other schools, the students at KCIT were more than happy with the school’s facilities. This is promising as it is both a feeder school for Prasat Sambour and Ah Thou. The students also felt comfortable in volunteering to teach each other, as they themselves suggested that peer education was an effective way to learn. A minor concern was the school’s availability, as they always seem busy according to the administrative team.’ - Taken from our TNA Report, Feb 2019.

Fortunately, we were able to achieve a lot more with the students at KCIT, due to their willingness to engage in extracurricular activities and enthusiasm. We weren’t able to achieve all of our objectives here, due to the limited amount of time we had with them. We didn’t conduct our TNA until week 4 on account of their busy schedule and sessions towards the end had to be cancelled because of unpredictable weather.

II.2.2 Peer Education - We chose to centre our peer education session around non-verbal communication so that the UK volunteers could get fully involved and the students could see tangible results, from the benefits of working as a team rather than individually as an example. We provided a leaflet to summarise the main points from our discussion but students here were very proactive and also took notes. The lesson plan for all of our sessions can be found in the lesson plan folder in our section on drive so you can see what we did. This was a key session across all the schools as it encouraged students to respect one another and demonstrated the effectiveness of learning from each other. This was a crucial founding point in terms of establishing sustainable student-led study sessions.

II.2.3 Community Network - We received the warmest welcome from both the students and school administration at KCIT, being given a tour of all the facilities they had to offer on our arrival. This was encouraging but from that point communication was often difficult as the people we were put in contact with (namely the administrative staff) had no idea when the students were available. Unfortunately, this meant we couldn’t conduct our TNA until Week 4 due to their unavailability. After seeing that KCIT functioned much like you’d expect an American High School would, we directly contacted the students who were more in control of their own agendas here than in other schools. Whilst they were extremely active in sharing posts from our Facebook page, we found that a specific KCIT Facebook group chat was more effective. From here we could update them of any last minute changes, ask them what they wanted to learn about and get them involved with our work at other schools.

Due to its facilities and central location, we also found that KCIT was the best school to centre our community outreach around, using it as a location to host events for the surrounding villages of Sambour, Samrith and Kampong Cheuteal. This proved most effective for our inclusive campaign ‘Equal opportunities for an inclusive community’ where we invited partner organisations to come and talk to both students and members of the community to inform them of academic, vocational and employment opportunities. For more information please see our activity report.

Unlike most other schools, the students at KCIT were happy with their school facilities and understood the importance of peer education without our prompts. From this, we planned to establish a ‘mutual volunteering’ youth club where students from KCIT would make the most of facilities such as their ICT suite, to teach student volunteers from other schools who were less fortunate than themselves. The fact that the scheme was student-led would encourage sustainability as the scheme would be of mutual benefit in teaching the KCIT students how to lead sessions which in turn would be beneficial for their CV and university applications, and the younger students would learn how to learn from their peers and gain valuable computing skills. Again, we were not able to implement this due to our limited time frame. We concluded it would be best to concentrate on building a strong founding knowledge of the benefits of volunteering in order to inform students of the many opportunities available to them. In doing this, we hoped that they would disseminate information to the wider school community, increasing interest, participation and commitment so that the next cycle had a higher chance of establishing a sustainable youth club. Once all the initial meetings were over, our role had very much been diminished to an introductory one.

II.2.4 Awareness Raising - We used our benefits of volunteering session as our introductory one at KCIT. As these were our eldest students, we decided to focus on cross cultural volunteering opportunities and university scholarships. Our handout was very well received and students actively took notes. We found it was most time effective to plan a general session and then tailor this to each school so that they would all benefit from the most applicable information. The students at KCIT were also very keen to practice their English so our UK volunteers could engage more and help deliver the session.

II.2.5 Training - Due to unpredictable weather, we couldn’t deliver our Y/C theory session at KCIT but this wasn’t a great loss as their youth council was easily the most established and effective one we had seen. During our cycle it was exam term for our students which meant that they were understandable very busy. Next term we hope that they will be more available. As both Prasat Sambour and Ah Thou are feeder schools for KCIT, we wanted to encourage the Youth Council to do some outreach work in these schools to lower the school dropout rate after grade nine. As well as encouraging soft skills, this would tackle the apathy towards Youth Councils in high schools and inspire more students to participate in extracurricular activities and make a positive difference within the school community.

II.2.6 Resource Development - We quickly identified that KCIT was the most fortunate in terms of their facilities, which they were happy to share with other schools. It would be the perfect place to run sessions and events from to encourage inter-school and inter-community volunteering. As well as the main school, they also have a careers officer and a local TVET centre which specialises in agriculture and technology. As part of our whole team community outreach work, we directed many marginalised villagers towards these facilities as they were interested in the idea of TVET and the courses they offered but felt that the main Kampong Thom campus was inaccessible. In terms of contacting the students, we used a Facebook group chat, we preferred to use this rather than our Facebook promotion page as time went on to avoid confusion between the schools. To further our ‘mutual volunteering’ idea, we also wanted to set up IT workshops, in which the students from KCIT would use their facilities to teach younger students from Prasat Sambour how to use a computer. Both schools seemed excited to establish this so we hope this is something you can organise.

II.3 Prasat Sambour Secondary School:
II.3.1 Action Research - ‘In order to make voluntary clubs sustainable, we now know the importance of planning an initial session on peer education and teamwork. This is something we will conduct in all the schools as a result. We also found out that most children already learn English, so an ICT club would be more effective if we can overcome challenges such as travel and resources. Students said that a significant barrier to volunteering was lack of parental consent. We are also planning a renovation of the library with our youth volunteers in the hope that this will make a lasting difference after our cycle ends. Once complete we plan to host an ‘open afternoon’ event to introduce our work and the power of volunteering to the wider community as well as improving parents’ enthusiasm in their child’s education.’ - Taken from our TNA Report, Feb 2019.

We carried out our action research with students in six classes at Prasat Sambour, many of whom offered constructive comments about how to improve their school facilities and we received much initial interest. Due to some miscommunication over the timings of sessions with the school director we seemed to lose out on a lot of the students, who weren’t aware we were running weekly sessions. Though you will have our attendance lists and membership policy be aware that lots of students may sign up and support you at first because they see you as a novelty, but have no interest in committing to your work in reality. For us, especially at Prasat Sambour, it actually worked better to have fewer regular students who we could pay more attention to and get to know more.

II.3.2 Peer Education - The Volunteering sub-team had the most success at Prasat Sambour, we put this down to good communication directly with the students and engaging sessions from the start. Although it may sound obvious, we would thoroughly recommend sitting down as a whole sub-team to create a lesson plan, translate it and then run through it to make sure everyone understands. This helped us to improve sessions to ensure that they had maximum impact and meant that we didn’t rely on any one of the Khmer volunteers. We learnt that writing was a problem, particularly with our younger students as they aren’t confident in writing in front of the class as they don’t take written exams until Grade 10. We focussed on games and verbal activities which were more far more effective in showing students the practical side of our objectives, we also believed that this encouraged sustained attendance, especially at Prasat Sambour.

II.3.3 Community Network - Whilst other sub-teams had problems, we were able to contact both the students and school director fairly easily. We had one session where the students didn’t turn up but we were informed this was because they had to catch up with some classes from the previous week, it’s worth calling regularly to confirm the times and dates of sessions even if you have allotted a set time or asking the children a couple of days in advance so that your time isn’t wasted. We were working with a mix of grades at this school so some of them didn’t have Facebook, but a group chat was still the most effective form of communication. We found that Prasat Sambour students were the most willing to give up their free time during school holidays or the weekend, so definitely use this to your advantage! The school director seemed reluctant to let us intervene for anything other than sessions. As above, we had initially planned to decorate and improve the library facilities based on the recommendations of the students. The director however, didn’t give us permission as he wanted to let another charity (Room-to-Read) do it instead. It would be worth talking to them to see if you can partner up for anything to create something sustainable as we think they are more long-term volunteers. This was quite frustrating but we were grateful that the school were both direct and clear with us so that we were able to make other plans that would still be of benefit to the students.

II.3.4 Awareness Raising - We received most positive feedback from students at Prasat Sambour and KCIT, so we felt our awareness raising had had the largest impact here. We used our benefits of volunteering session to promote volunteering for personal development and employability. We recommend creating summative leaflets with links to further information for the students to take home. Our discussion about the misconceptions of volunteering helped to alleviate the students’ worries, and they were also able to relay this to their parents as well as the positives of volunteering both for the individual and the community. As we couldn’t renovate the library, we opted to paint wooden signs and hang them on the trees instead. We had a workshop where our students painted signs with slogans about volunteering and education. They then put them on trees around the school. These slogans were based on what they had learnt during their time with us, so that they could raise awareness among the wider school community. We were so pleased with the outcome and we hope that these signs will indirectly help more students after we leave.

II.3.5 Training – We also taught our Youth Council Theory session here. We were so pleased with how the students engaged, taking their group presentations seriously and showing support for one another. An initial suggestion that our peer education session had some effect on their attitude towards learning. The students actually suggested that they would like to write up a poster on the qualities of being a good student and hang it in the library. Due to Khmer New Year celebrations we didn’t get round to this but it’s worth noting they take pride in their work and the school director gave us permission to hang posters in the library if nothing else.

II.3.6 Resource Development – We loved the students at Prasat Sambour and it was incredibly rewarding to see their growth in confidence, fuelled by their commitment and willingness to learn. We were recently told by our students that the school plans to expand into a high school, following the KCIT model, encouraging more students to continue until grade 12. It may be worth conducting a follow up TNA to see how imminent these plans are. We would also recommend talking to ‘Room to Read’ to see what their future plans are concerning their involvement with the school to encourage collaborative rather than competitive volunteering! We also would advise talking to KCIT to see if establishing regular ICT workshops would be possible, this would ensure that we leave something sustainable behind. The students at Prasat Sambour were so enthusiastic, it is certainly a promising school.

II.4 ATSU Primary and Secondary School:
II.4.1 Action Research –‘Here the management seemed a little better than the other two high schools so our focus shifted towards more educational sessions that would develop the students’ soft skills. The director suggested that we pay particular attention to the Youth Council which most of the students would support. It’s worth noting that this school may require more communication as it is further away and the director was organising a litter pick in parallel to us and we had no prior knowledge of this until the day before.’ – Taken from our TNA Report, Feb 2019.

 Though we worked with both primary and secondary, we didn’t conduct our TNA with the Primary School as we felt that they were too young, particularly as secondary students needed more support with it than expected. We also received helpful advice from the school directors. We had an initial meeting with the Youth Council to introduce the project and we worked closely with them throughout, basing our sessions off of their recommendations.

II.4.2 Peer Education – Unfortunately, the secondary school had exams so we only worked on peer education with the younger children. In hindsight, this was probably more useful as the Youth Council at the secondary school seemed well supported by teachers and students alike. After initial worry that we had made the concept of the session too complicated, we were pleased to report that the students loved it, giving us very positive verbal feedback. We think again it was effective because of our focus on games and interactive activities to display the advantages of peer education rather than verbal discussion. It also meant that we didn’t have to adapt sessions as much as initially planned because the outcomes were transferable regardless of age, saving us valuable time.

II.4.3 Community Network – Good communication with the students through the school directors was a major factor in our team’s success at Ah Thou. Teachers were always available to talk to us, displaying their interest by sitting in on sessions when they could. The director also ensured that larger events were well supported – including both the litter pick at the school, as well as the inclusive campaign at KCIT which was very gratifying. We were also really appreciative that they informed us when they were busy in advance so that we could schedule our sessions around their exams or village events, for example. This meant that this was the only school where no sessions were cancelled or delayed. Though we initially though that we would have to make more of an effort to communicate with this school, we were pleasantly surprised at how proactive and supportive they were of our work.

II.4.4 Awareness Raising – We led our benefits of volunteering introductory session with both the primary and secondary schools, as well as an additional session on the SDGs with the older students. Overall, our sessions were useful as students were willing to learn about contentious issues that might affect their generation, but it was just disheartening to see that the theory they had learnt could not be put into practice. Using the litter pick as an example, we found that the school understood the dangers of burning plastic within the school playground, not to mention the disastrous effects it had on the environment. However, realistic alternatives were not available so the whole event proved to be futile. There is no rubbish disposal authority for rural Cambodia and the school could not afford to call someone to pick up the plastic to be recycled.

II.4.5 Training – Our sessions with the primary school were more experimental to start with, as we were uncertain of their level of comprehension or engagement. After seeing that they had no problem in understanding, we would recommend considering a collaboration between the primary and secondary to increase the likelihood of sustainability. We also worked closely with the Youth Council as we found that they were able to inform other students of our plans and objectives most effectively.

II.4.6 Resource Development – We were the only group to work with the primary school, so we found our work at Ah Thou was doubly rewarding. Sustained participation here was very encouraging, we felt the students we taught were learning lots from us, as well as the ones who were finding out about our work indirectly, through the Youth Council or larger events. We were very grateful for both the enthusiasm of the school director and students, they really boosted our morale when sessions at other schools didn’t go according to plan. Though the facilities at the secondary school were better than expected, we were surprised at how poor the community was. Despite its distance, we think this village would greatly benefit from more work.


III. Overall Limitations and Recommendations –
a) An obvious limitation on arrival was the language barrier. This was both a significant difficulty within our sub-team and within the community. The UK volunteers were told that the project would be English led, with the help of proficient English speaking volunteers to facilitate them. This was absolutely not the case even from arrival, but it definitely turned out for the better in most circumstances. It did however mean that we had to redefine our perception of the project and ambitions for it quite quickly. As the first cycle this was even harder for us due to all the initial reports and evidence we were supposed to collect. Luckily for our sub-team, our Khmer volunteers were always willing to try to translate for us and their confidence grew as the project went on. Despite all our planning together, small misunderstandings still occurred regularly, but they were easily rectifiable.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do about this, just try to be patient and run through ideas, plans and meetings at every possible opportunity.

Credit to: Alfie and Millie ( loveliest teammate).