13th of December 2009

Time to say goodbye for a few weeks... Our both children Narayani and Mahesa will fly with me to Germany to celebrate Christmas with my German family. So I was happy we could arrange another meeting with the children of the Manuksesa Children Project before my departure.
The kids all know that (most) of their sponsors are christian and therefore will celebrate Christmas. It was a pleasure for them to sing "Merry Christmas" to all their sponsors. Just look here :-).
We also arranged the new "clean up village list" for 2010. Every month different kids of the Manuksesa Children Project are responsible to clean up the village street. Also our Villa Manuk staff is joining this activity.

22nd of November 2009

I found some very good English conversation Learn CDs for children and we watched together this CD on my laptop. I stopped this program always after a few sentences and it was the first time the children were more motivated to communicate. They all loved it and looking forward for their next lesson. The children and I were very happy that on this meeting Beate Volkmer and her husband Guenther Luge joined, the co-founder of the Manuksesa Children Project.

8th of November 2009

Today I decided to interrupt the English course and to check instead the children’s teeth and explain them how to brush their teeth properly.
A few years ago I joined a social project during my time as GM in Gaia-Oasis. For a few weeks in 2006 the dental-hygienist Lina from Germany made a Caries prophylaxis and dental hygienic project with more than 500 children in Tejakula. And I joined many of these seminars and also checked hundreds of teeth at that time.

It saddened me to see also here in Manuksesa, that most of the children have big holes in their teeth, caries, etc. One front tooth of a teenage girl was in big parts destructed by caries. Due to the fact that the parents of the kids have no money they do not send them to the dentist and till now the village people have no access yet for free or cheap doctor treatment (we hope there will be soon a change).
So it is very important that the kids from beginning know how to clean their teeth.
For this seminar I bought for the smaller kids special children teeth brushes because in my experience they only get the big ones which are of course not appropriate for a children’s mouth. Also I bought some special children tooth paste so we could directly practice brushing teeth together.


All the children were very interested and hardly anybody of them did brush their teeth before correctly. Some of the smaller kids seemed very seldom to use a tooth brush, after we started to brush their teeth a few children’s gum directly started to bleed.
We all felt this was a very important and good seminar and hopefully we can follow up next time with somebody from the local health care.

18th of October 2009

It was the children's wish to continue with the program "Learn English". They do know quiet many words and love to learn more vocabulary, but it is not easy to encourage them to try to speak complete sentences in English. Also I found it not so motivating only to sit on the terrace or on the Bale Bengong, so we made this time a walk through the garden and tried to make some communication in English.

11th of October 2009

In the last weeks we received many paintings and one evening we made an exhibition in our restaurant Warung Bambu Pemaron where the guests could give their votes. Also from a few days before some guests were interested and voted the paintings. It was quiet difficult to find a fair system for the votes, because children from 6 years till some adults (staff Villa Manuk) were joining. So we decided to write down on every painting the age of the painter and the guests had 5 votes each to choose their 5 best pictures in consideration of the painter’s age.
The winners were:
Made Suka Artawan, 12 years; Made Sandi Harta ,14 years; Komang Arya, 31 years; Ni Luh Ariwati, 14 years; Made Satiasa, 9 years.
Because only two winners were present, the three other prices were taken representative by their friends or family. 5 of the big presents (pencil cases) were gladly received. Some of the other pencils and pens from the donation of Uschi and Wolf were given in the last seminars for those who made great homework.

20th of September 2009

On this afternoon we followed up with singing and learning English words. The children brought their homework (they painted again subjects which name they do not know in English) and they learned a lot of new words. Also for me very interesting – so I could improve my Indonesian vocabulary.
The children got this time from me the homework to paint a picture with the subject “My beautiful and clean village”. All the children from our project and our staff can participate in this painting competition.