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A few years ago, a young couple were sent on work assignments for their jobs in the aviation industry. The work took them to Cambodia, an exciting and far flung adventure with a bit of exotic oriental colour, tastes and sites added. Makes a change from a dreary, grey Scottish winter they probably thought. Get in a bit of world sight-seeing while we are still young. Travel to exciting far away lands. Have a bit of an adventure.

And they found all that. The people of Cambodia are a wonderful; friendly, hard-working and gracious people with a long cultural tradition, beautiful art, tasty foods, sandy beaches and sunshine, palm trees reflected against cloudless skies. Cheap, too, by our standards.  All things we dream about when it’s cold and dark outside.

They had adventures on the way, bunjee jumping, and underwater swimming, encounters with wild animals like tigers. All in all, a great time.

So, why am I writing this post?

Because Michael and Claire  found something else too. Grinding poverty, orphaned children, adults suffering from physical conditions caused by the cocktail of chemicals used during wars in the not-so-distant past that spread havoc and destruction over Cambodia and its neighbouring countries. They even saw children who had been born affected with those same physical handlicaps as the parents which were being passed on to the next generation.

So, a decision was made. They couldn’t just walk away. They had to do something about it.

Their idea was simple. It was provide education in one of the villages as a way to help the children to break out of the cycle of grinding poverty that traps them. There is the old saying: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day: teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

Thus, when they came home, Claire Henderson and Michael Branney started a charity called Gifts4Kids Cambodia. They are sponsoring a young person to go to University to become a teacher. He has been gone for a few years and will soon be done. He will return to the village where he will be able to educate the children.

They started a small school. To begin with, it was literally a sheltering roof put over a gap between the walls of two nearby houses. They began with a couple of children. It was popular, word spread and it grew.

They started an ebay business as a charity to raise funds to support the school, send books, clothes and materials to the children in the Puok district of Cambodia which they decided to help.  They do fundraisers when they are home in Scotland –they live in Glasgow. They also go out to Cambodia, when they can, to visit the school and help with developing their project.

In a few years, since about 2009, what was just an idea to help provide support and education has built up to become a real school. They bought a small piece of land in Puok District and last year they were able to raise a small school building on it. The building has a wood framework covered over with thatch and leaves, the local building materials. You can see the story of the school on the facebook page, in photos, starting from the empty piece of land in a clearing in the trees, as it goes through all its stages, land cleared, wood cut, building frame made and erected, roof frame secured and then the thatching filling in the frame all the way to the finished building. A small two-room village school is born!

They have teachers who do twleve one-hour classes at the school in a day. They are in so much demand that some times 400 extra children show up in a day to see if they can squeeze in to one of the lessons.

See the photos on their Facebook page. You can see the smiling faces of the kids. This is the work of Michael Branney and Claire Henderson and their charity at Gifts4Kids Cambodia. If you have a moment, visit them on Facebook at Gifts4Kids Cambodia and see for yourself what they are doing.

It is heart warming.

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