“Meeting the boys and girls from the Apostolic Prefecture of Battambang who came to play in the Tennis Cambodia junior tournament was an inspiring experience, as it was to meet Alvaro from Madrid who’s been in Battambang helping these children make the most of their opportunities after some very tough starts to life”.
– Jon Aspin (P6F South East Asia Communications Coordinator)
October 6th, P6F Director, Daniel Buberis, and South East Asia P6F Communications Coordinator, Jon Aspin, spent 4 days in Siem Reap, Cambodia, supporting the children of our mission partner, Apostolic Prefecture of Battambang, compete in a junior tennis tournament run by Tennis Cambodia. Eleven boys and girls from the mission competed in the tournament with 2 of them winning their age group.
The tournament forms part of the missions ‘sport-4-life skills’ development program, in which the children are given the opportunity to learn a sport ( tennis, soccer, basketball, volleyball), as well as receive a school education, and then are exposed to local competitions in order to help set goals and encourage them to work towards achieving them – amongst helping develop other life skills.
In what was very hot and humid conditions over the four days, it was great to watch the kids compete, have fun, which was inspiring in itself, but to also listen to their personal stories of hardship and tragedy, as well as spend time learning more about how we can further strengthen our commitment to support the mission in its sports and physical education programs.
We met and spent time with Alvaro, one of the welfare volunteers from Spain who has been working at the mission for 12 months, who was tasked with chaperoning and supporting the children, and he shared with us the experience of driving in a crowded 5 seater Four Wheel Drive for 4 hours to get to the tournament. We can only image what that experience would have been like!
On the first night, we joined the children out at dinner with Alvaro and got to learn more about them, and over the next few days, we also took the children through some fun and challenging physical activities, technical ‘tennis movement’ sessions, as well as played several games of soccer, which to our amazement was played at a particularly frenetic and highly skilled level, and left us older adults struggling to keep up!
It was a great learning experience which allowed us the opportunity to help reach out to the mission intimately, and importantly seek clarity on how we can make a long term impact in helping develop the children and providing learning opportunities.
We learnt that most of the children from the mission come from very poor farming families, some without parents, or at least one has deceased, and in some instances the children are temporarily abandoned as their parents are forced to give them up to look for work across the border in Thailand, but some are simply abandoned.
What we also learnt, there are no coaches at the mission to help coach the children properly, other than the volunteers and teachers who often are not familiar with the sport or have the skills and experience to teach physical education, other than teach them what they know, otherwise the children are forced learn themselves. Also, there is a shortage of sporting equipment, including poor facilities, if any at all, and also there is a growing number of children with disabilities moving into the mission, which there are not enough resources to support the sport programs the mission want to implement to help engage the children (learn more about our partnership here)
Following on from this tour, we have since committed to donating a mini tennis kit that will soon make its way to Cambodia, as well as a further commitment to help deliver clinics, workshops, and programs in early 2020, and also with the aim to contribute to help funding build and upgrade new and exisiting sporting facilities.