Our first Community Action Day

Due to a lot of sickness due to health and hygiene with the UK volunteers and Khmer locals, we decided to do our first CAD on health and hygiene. I won’t run through all the planning we did for this but I will take you through the session.

This was the original timetable which was made by Nita. However, we didn’t end up starting until 2.30 as the nurse who was giving a speech about Dengue Fever was very late and it is disrespectful to start without the guest speakers.

Introductions to all guests, including ourselves, were made and the school director made his opening speech. As well as our presentations, each of us had jobs. Hamdi and I were timekeepers which seems easy enough but involved a lot of thinking due to the lateness in starting.

The Dengue Fever nurse was supposed to give a 30 minute presentation and instead gave an 8 minute presentation. As much as that helped us move things with time, you can only wonder how much you can learn about Dengue in 8 minutes.

The first group to present was Volunteering. They did their presentation on the body and food hygiene. The students really took in all the information and the diagrams were accurate and informative. However, we had a few problems in the team as a whole. Each presentation was supposed to be 20 minutes, due to some miscommunication, volunteering‘s presentation was only 8 minutes long.

And again, there’s only so much you can learn in 8 minutes. Although these are all lessons learned for the next CAD.

Employment team did their presentations on body hygiene and exercise. Their presentation was really informative; they even brought all the students outside to do an exercise class with them; showing them that they could do exercise without the cost of equipment and the benefit’s of this.

At the end of their presentation, they gave out notebooks and pens in a ”planking competition”. The Khmer Students can plank for ages!

They struggled as the Khmer and UK volunteers struggled to communicate through the presentation. Two of the Khmer volunteers were sitting outside on their phones whilst 3 UK and 1 Khmer were doing their presentation and putting in all the work. There was no excuse for that. However, they smashed it!

We did our presentation on Oral Hygiene with a quiz at the end. For the prizes, we gave out toothbrushes and toothpaste with fluoride as they don’t have a lot of proper toothpaste in our community. The students were really interactive with the session which is always nice. We also created a huge mouth and toothbrush and let the students come up and show us how to brush your teeth!

We also played splat in two big teams for an energiser. The students always love splat and so do we! Although Ed usually wins and got down to the final two, I’m pretty sure Ed let the girl win!

The students wanted to take loads of photos with us, which obviously we were up for!

The Khmer also prepared Lots of fruit for the Students and guests which they loved! Overall, it was a really good day and a great effort for our first CAD. In the debrief at the office afterwards, we mostly reflected on the things that went wrong but it needed to be done so that lessons can be learned for the next CAD. Everything went really well for our first go.