This week we interviewed Mr. Duncan Bell, the co-founder of Helping Hand Cambodia, an NGO that takes kids off the street and thanks to indifivual sponsorships, sends them to BELTEI School for a proper high-quality education. In addition to tuition support, Mr. Bell and his small staff have a large building in Chbar Ampov where the students can study, work on computers, take English classes, read in the library, or play games on the top open-air floor. Mr. Bell splits his time between Cambodia and his home in the UK. Stop by for a visit before he returns to the UK this December! And please donate to help his cause HERE.
EuroCham: When did you first come to Cambodia and what provided the spark for you to create Helping Hand?
Duncan: My wife and I came to Cambodia 11 years ago as missionaries for two years. We had a two year plan, worked for two NGOs, one of which worked in the community where we are now. We had no ambitions to start the charity that we organized. But somebody at our church wanted to help. So we suggested they sponsor a child to go to school and it had a ripple effect from there. Other people heard about it, wanted to do the same and it got bigger and bigger.
So when we got back after two years, we sort of thought we better do things properly. We got a website done, became a registered charity in England and Wales, became a local NGO here in Cambodia during the same year, 2017. And it just evolved from there. So there was no plan at all, it’s just God led us. We saw a need and we saw that this worked. What we have now is evidence that it works because the students are doing well at university, doing well at school.
Whereas when we first started, it was just a good idea. We had no evidence.
We just give them the opportunity. They take it and there’s this misconception that because they come from a poor background from a third world country, they’re not very intelligent, not very bright, but that’s not true. They just never had the opportunity.
Some of our students are very bright. They really are. They come top in their class grades and they get good grades at university. And that just is fuel for the fire for us to help and support as many children as we can. We’ve got 46 kids at the moment. We’ve lost one or two along the way for one reason or another. So it’s 46.
It has gotten bigger and bigger, which has been one of our problems, a nice problem, because when we had 20 or so, we could cope with that amount. Now we have 40 or so and we have maybe the same staff, maybe a little bit more staff, but we need to find that balance, which means we need to get a better structure in place to support more children.
You see them grow up from children to young adults, young men, young women. And with them taking the opportunities they have, they have the future in their hands that they can do what they want to do.
EuroCham: Could you please give a brief overview of the services offered at Helping Hand?
Duncan: Primarily it’s about education. We sponsor children from poor communities, which is where we work, to go to BELTEI School.
And in effect, we put aim to put their future in their own hands. We’ve managed to do other things as well over the years. We have a rice sponsorship scheme which allows us to donate rice to those who need it in the community.
We want to do that for those who are most needy and it tends to be the older generation, the older ladies who don’t have any family or whose family have maybe neglected them. So we do that as well. People donate and organisations donate clothes and toys to us to distribute in the community. We also receive money donations for rice, So that’s part of what we do also. It doesn’t sound very exciting but we’re getting back to basics here, which is food and shelter.
So we sort of facilitate helping those in the community as well and over the years we’ve got a little bit bigger. People come to know and respect what we do and they can trust us. We’ve really become part of the community and primarily Chanthy [Helping Hand coordinator], she lives next to the community that we mostly serve. People know her, respect her and she’s Cambodian, which is important.
It went from being centrally focused on education and then there are these other facets that have come from it as well. We received around 10,000 items of clothing from Decathlon, which is amazing, great, but then we had to sort it all out! It wasn’t a problem but it was a lot of work because we haven’t got many staff. But the families in the community, we’re very blessed by that because Decathlon is a big organisation and they have good quality clothing.
So it’s not like we’ve just passed on bits and pieces that nobody else wants.
EuroCham: Could you share a success story of a child that you helped and went on to achieve something great?
Duncan: Yeah, certainly. Theara was one of our first students. He fell into a bad crowd. He was in a bad crowd when we sort of came to know him.
He has a tattoo on his arm which I think translates as “family” or something like that. Not his real family, but his gangster friends, he fell in with. So he was heading one way and he got a sponsorship and now he’s gone the other way, a good way.
So he has a very positive attitude. He’s in his second year at BELTEI University doing business. He works at BELTEI in their admin department as well. He gets good grades, wants to be a businessman. His English is very good. And the important thing I think with him as well is the fact that he has a sponsor who really cares for him. So they communicate fairly often and she’s donated money for items such as his own laptop for quite a few years now, which helped him a lot in his studies.
He’s one of these lads who had a bad attitude but given the opportunity, he’s done very well with it. And he’s got a lot of good options for the future.
Changing attitudes or behaviour like this is something we never planned to do, it’s something we’ve learnt along the way. And some of that we obviously can’t really take credit for because what it teaches the children, I’ve found, is confidence and respect, self-respect.
Because without self-respect it’s very hard to respect other people or other things. And now you look at our children, they come in and they wear smart clothes. The girls do their hair a bit nice, maybe a little bit of jewelry.
The lads want to look a bit cool. Just as children and youngsters would do all over the world, it’s the same the world over. But it just enables them, I think, in a safe and confident environment, to be themselves with a good set of standards.
I believe that you’re very much influenced by your surroundings. And these children, before they become part of our organization or get a sponsorship, are surrounded by things that are not very beneficial in life for one reason or another.
They don’t have much of any hope for the future — drinks, fights, gambling — there’s a lot of that that goes on in the community and that’s what they see around them. So that’s just how they think the whole world is. But in our organization, it’s not like that. And they kind of realised that they can be valued, not by myself and Chanthy and Panha and the other people who work here, but by the other students, the other children, the older ones, they realise that they’re nice kids and respect them.
So there’s no great effort in doing it, but it’s just something that is there and it rubs off, it makes a difference. We’ve got a number of children, I could think of, who when they came here, maybe had bad attitudes, had short attention spans as well for one reason or another, which I can understand, whereas now, you can see a change in them, can’t you?
I think part of it is teaching them that, and the other part is them responding. If they didn’t respond well, then it would be a waste of time, we wouldn’t be sitting here now, but they all respond in a very positive attitude, even those that do have issues at home one way or another.
EuroCham: What are some of the difficulties of maintaining an operation such as Helping Hand?
Duncan: The difficulty is financial. To be honest with you, we don’t like to turn sponsors away, and it’s evolved over the years from having 20, 30, 40, nearly 50 children now, sponsored, but we wouldn’t want to say no, we don’t want to sponsor a child.
So it’s evolved slowly, and as I said earlier, we need to have a good structure in place. So we’ve employed another lady who works two days a week to help Chanthy to help us support her so it gives her a bit of freedom, a bit more time.
And we’ve learned from the mistakes we’ve made, I certainly have, but it’s a balance because there’s so much opportunity in these poor communities. We want to help them so much, but we can’t do it unless we do it properly. If you don’t do it properly it’s not worth doing it because you sort of dangle them a carrot and a string if you like and they’re chasing after it and they’re never able to fulfill what we promised them or what we offer them.
We need funding. And like a lot of NGOs, a lot of businesses, a lot of organizations in the world today, our costs have gone up, our income’s gone down and you can’t run a charity on emotions and feelings, as much as we want to. So we have to be pragmatic about it. So we’ve got options, we’re in discussions with the landlord at moment about reducing the rent. That’s our biggest overhead. It’s the rent and also the utility costs, it’s probably another $40 a month for everything on top of that.
But this is integral to what we do. And if we don’t rent this building, then we’re kind of in limbo with what we’re doing with our children. We’re giving them what we say on the packet, which is we’re sending them to a good school and offering them good education and responding well to that.
It’s a hard one. But we’re at that place at the moment and trust God will provide. And if he’s saying no to us that we’ve done enough and that’s the end, then so be it.
Because like I say, you can’t run it on emotions or feelings.
The main problem we have at the moment is they put their school fees up. So they put their school fees up by $100 for each child. They’ve also added extra costs on such as school trips, which used to be optional, but they added those costs on. So it costs us about just over $8,500, between $8,500 and $9,000 extra just to stand still from last year, because those fees have gone up and these fees have been added. We have to pay for someone from age nine all the way to uni.
It’s evolved from being BELTEI School, BELTEI University, now on to Panasastra University as well, and maybe in the future others as well.
EuroCham: What are some ways for people to help if they choose to do so?
Duncan: Publicise what we do, get it out ther. It’s evolved, like I say, initially from church and friends on social media, Facebook, friends in Cambodia, friends back home in the UK. So we kind of finished, if you like, with our own circles. So to publicise it, make people aware of what we do, as well as making people aware of how successful it is with regards to the students.
Apart from that, it’s financially supporting us as an organisation. I’m probably right in saying 99% of our finances are spent in Cambodia. From our last year’s audits, the only money that wasn’t spent was when we had to have our accounts audted back home in the UK, which cost, whatever it costs, less than $100.
So that’s the only money that’s spent in the UK. Everything else is spent here in Cambodia. So we’re very transparent. People can look and see our records, our accounts. But funding, just to keep us going primarily, so I don’t have to close the building, I don’t want to do that.
And then beyond that, to grow. So which means getting more staff, giving Chanthy, respectfully, the salary she’s due. Because again, what we were doing with 20, 30 children, we’re now doing the same with 45 children, 46, nearly 50.
But there’s potential, there is so much potential here, and so much potential for Cambodia and these children, because otherwise they’ll end up working in phone shops, working at market stores, construction work, but they can do better than that. And I ask and say to anybody who is interested, come and visit and see us, see our children, tell us what they think they can do to improve what we do, because we got something that’s a bit special here I think.
