Created from scratch in 2015, Smile Village is a community that has been co-founded four years ago by PSE and a Singaporean NGO, Small Steps. Their project was to provide families with a new place to live because they could no longer live in their old houses due to floods. Small Steps was taking care of all the hygiene facilities while PSE built the Community Service Center to welcome and educate children while their parents were working. Despite all the efforts made by both NGOs, numerous parents are still working on the dumpsite and it is not rare to see children sewing bags for the garbage pickers. “If there weren’t the Summer Camp, I would help my mom sewing the bags” says Seangly, one of the little girls from the community.
Smile Village’s care center is the heart of the community.
Here, the community center is located in the middle of the village, open to everyone. Kids are running all day long from their parents to the paillote, who are also an inherent part of the Summer Program. This is what is so unique in Smile Village, the monitors are bringing lots of joy, dances, and smiles to the children but also to their families who the orange-T-shirts-guys with who they share their daily life during a month.
45 minutes away from PSE’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, the pastel colored paillote welcomes between 80 and 110 kids a day, from 2 to 15 years old. Split into two parts, separated by a big blue wood playground, Smile Village’s care center is the heart of the community: under the big roof of the open canteen kids are eating and playing all day long, as well as some of their mums sit to share a talk or watch the kids play, and along the playground, laundry is drying on racks or bushes.
“This paillote is very different from the other ones because it’s in the middle of a village, so that we see the families every day and as it’s open on the whole village we live with them”, Pauline, European coordinator for Smile Village. “We live the life of the village, the parents are super happy we’re here even if we make a lot of noise in the middle of their village”. Indeed, days at Smile are well occupied, every minute is a minute being busy both for the children and the monitors: jumping, dancing, running, competing in the Olympics, there’s plenty of rituals that rhythms their weeks and the overflowing and positive energy of Smile is contagious.
Here a specific attention is paid to the kids’ feedback, thoughts and impressions.
The very bright kids of Smile respond extremely well to the various activities they are offered: they run as well as they play board games or paint some face masks. Everything is setup to grow the children’s curiosity: reading, card games, educational workshops or drawing sessions about their future. They are particularly fond of becoming teachers during the daily Khmer class after their English class. The monitors are indeed, showing the example by dividing tasks and activities equally among European and Khmer monitors, each one learning from the other.
Here a specific attention is paid to the kids’ feedback, thoughts and impressions. Every day, they are asked how they feel, what did they think from the game they just played, what did they learn during it. And their answers are surprisingly thoughtful for kids of 9 or 10 years old, sometimes even younger. Indeed, they evoke teamwork, cohesion, and are always up to share and analyze. “By allowing them to speak as much and as often as possible, the children got used to share loudly their feelings and their stories and they do it ith more confidence every day. That makes me feel closer than I’ve ever been to them” explains Candyce, 2nd year monitor. They also enjoy the daily meditation a lot and it is both touching and amusing to see them putting so much effort into getting relaxed and trying to calm down after the excitation of the morning.
Keeping Smile’s children busy is not an easy work for their monitors: curious, full of energy and very affectionate towards them, it requires the monitors a lot of imagination and vitality. In this paillote, every day is seen as a new adventure and it is even more obvious on Thursdays when every monitor turns into a new character during the theme day. During the Pirates’ day for example, new teams were formed, all of them lead by a captain: one of the older children of the paillote who was in charge of motivating their team from one challenge to another in order to gather the pieces of the hidden treasure’s map.
“We like to organize special activities which make them play and be happy all day long, as we did with the ‘Pirate Game’”, explains Bunthet Theoun, the Khmer coordinator of the paillote.
The boundless energy of both the kids and their monitors redesigns the life of the whole community for a month.
Children here behave like one big family, they all know each other really well and there is no room for shame or anxiety to be all together. That allows some magical moments to happen, such as seeing the smallest children take the micro to sing while everyone’s cheering. In this place where most of the children are really young, the oldest feel a special responsibility in guiding their kroms (teams) and helping their monitors in making the youngest sing or dance. It is also quite common in Smile Village to see one of the kids PSE is taking care of, carrying his little sister or brother with his baby bottle around the day-care center while their parents are busy working. The paillote being located in the middle of the village and fully opened to it, kids come and go the whole day long.
Smile Village is the home of a hundred kids, whose families welcome PSE’s monitors in August as part of their family so that everyone live smoothly side by side during the four-week-summer program. The boundless energy of both the kids and their monitors redesigns the life of the whole community for a month, bringing them laughs, hope, joy and above all, smiles.
PSE would like to thank Jamming Teatro, Compañía Jamms and Teatro Maravillas for its financial support to the School Continuity Programme.
