Major Projects

Help The Underprivileged Children In Jakarta

Dear Happy Angels and Friends,

This is the third consecutive year that Happy Angels, with the help of our Indonesian counterpart, will be reaching out to help the underprivileged in Jakarta. Unlike the previous year, Happy Angels will be working with another charitable organization, Sahabat Anak. Sahabat Anak, (which means friends of children) was established in 1997 with a mission to help and befriend children from dysfunctional families. Since then, they have been actively involved in various local activities to help the street children. You may find out more about this organization at www.sahabatanak.com.

With this new collaboration, Happy Angels aims to reach the underprivileged in a different way this year. According to a health report in 2008, there were at least 18 million malnutrition children in Indonesia. The long term effects of malnutrition may lead to physical, mental and intellectual problems in a child, and sometimes even death. Various reasons contribute to this huge figure. Poverty, which leads to the inability to afford basic necessities such as food, and uneducated parents, who are unaware of the importance of nutrition are some of the main culprits.

This year, Sahabat Anak takes up the responsibility to help in launching the campaign to create awareness on food nutrition for the children. They are also inviting generous donors to provide nutritious meals for the underprivileged children. With a mere sum of Rp50,000 (about S$7.50), Sahabat Anak will be able to provide 10 meals per child. Each child will then be able to receive one nutritious meal (price about Rp5,000) on a weekly basis over 10 weeks. This campaign will last till July 2010.

Happy Angels will be participating in this meaningful campaign by sponsoring 100 under privileged children. This will be a long term project for Happy Angels. We aim to continuously providing the nutritious food for these children even after the first 10 weeks. On 31 January 2010, Happy Angels and Sahabat Anak will be distributing the first pack of nutritious meal to the sponsored children. Should you have a Jakarta night stop flight (crew member) or are interested to be present for this event, please contact Irene @ +62 8180 668 66 88. If you are interested to make monetary contribution, please contact Christine @ +65 9225 3834.

A pack of nutritious meal for the children may include green beans, eggs, biscuits, fruits and milk.  Although it doesn’t cost much to provide healthy and nutritious food, to these children however, this meal is very hard to come by.  With your care and concern that we share through your contribution, not only will we bring joy to the little ones, but most important of all health!


Your Sincerely,

Irene Oi And Christine Tho

Happy Angels

We Care We Share

http://the-happy-angels.blogspot.com/

KDM & Happy Angels 2nd Joint Education Project - Nov 2006

After the success of the first KDM & Happy Angels joint Education project in April, Happy Angels re-visited KDM again on 24 – 28 November 2006. A total of 13 volunteers from Happy Angels went on this 5 days adventurous trip to KDM Cileungsi, Jakarta. We were delighted to have local volunteers from SIA Jakarta office joining us.

On this project, Happy Angels hopes to sustain our objectives from the April 2006 visit and has included new objects for this project:

* To reward self-deserving kids who has been sustaining their positive spirit of learning. * To reinforce and rekindle the learning spirit in the kids. * To foster esprit de corps through various outdoor activities.

We hope to achieve the objectives through:

1. English Proficiency Level Identify their English proficiency through English Tests for different literacy levels. English test was conducted to identify the top learners in English and it also serves as a benchmark for us to identify which level they are at in order for us to help them to learn English at a comfortable pace.

2. Future Leaders To encourage children to be leaders. Some of the children were identified to plan and organize activities for the volunteers during our visit. Each child was given roles and duties to perform.

3. Team Building Children were separated into different teams with a team leader amongst them. Games and activities were planned to encourage communication and decision-making within the team.

4. Caring and Sharing We went for a trekking trip to the waterfalls. Children have to take care of the volunteers and their friends throughout the trip. They need to ensure that everyone has enough food to eat and everything is taken care of.

On this project, children were given opportunities to prepare the programs and take care of the necessary needs for the Camping trip to the waterfall. It was a 2 days trekking to the mountains. They planned games, camping equipments, transport arrangements etc.

During our 5 days visit, English test, activities and talent time were planned for the children. An appraisal system was also designed to grade the children’s behavior during the entire trip. We will identify the top 10 winners from the compilation of scores from the English Test, Talent Time and Appraisal.

The prize for the top 3 winners is an educational visit to Singapore and the next 7 winners will get to visit to Bali, Indonesia.

To SIA Jakarta Ground Staff,

Thank you very much for the wonderful time. Happy Angels is indeed very honour to work together with you. Hope to work with you guys again in near future.

KDM & Happy Angels 1st Joint Education Project - Apr 2006

Kampus Diakoneia Modern (KDM) was started in January 1972 by Mr Liem Tiong Sien and has since helped 10,000 street children aged 2 to 18 years old. KDM has 5 transit houses in Jakarta, Indonesia; a dormitory cum training school in Pondok Gede and a farming training centre in Cileungsi,West Java. Currently, there are about 120 children undergoing academic and skills development courses.

The three major objectives of KDM are:

1. To provide shelter and friendship to the street children 2. To mould and educate them 3. To help the children to be independent

In order to achieve its objectives, KDM has created:

A Befriender program was introduced, where every night, volunteers will talk to the children, giving them advice and help as a friend. There would also be activities every weekend, such as lessons on drawing & spelling. In addition, birthday parties would be held every 3 months for the children. Such a program is currently serving 400 street children.

A center with 2 training schools, where education and information on training & development would be provided for the children. The older children would receive vocational training in skills such as farming and car/motorbike repairs. One-to-one counseling would also be provided to aid in the children’s development and to bring out the best in them. So far, these programs have yielded a success rate of 80 %.

There are currently about 30 000 street children in Jakarta. They arrived from various parts of Indonesia. Most of them illegally hopped onto public transportation like trains, ferries or trucks and make their way to Jakarta. Sadly, some of them did not make it to their destination due to hunger or accidents.

KDM volunteers patrol the streets of Jakarta and counsel these children, advising them to return to their home. As most of the children fled their homes without any forms of identification, it was difficult to trace their origin. Most of the children had serious family problems such as being abused by step-parents or molestation. Therefore they refused to return home despite the hardships suffered on the streets.

The streets offered the children both a place to sleep and a place to work. The children earned a living by begging or doing odd-jobs. However, the streets also enticed them into a darker world of alcoholic drinks, drugs and glue-sniffing, a world where they could escape from the realities of life. This however became a vicious cycle as the children turned to a life of crime in order to get money to fuel their ‘escapades’.

Some children however went to Jakarta in order to get money to help family members, as in the case of 14 yr-old Asep, who needed money to pay for his younger brother’s operation. He was unfortunately forced into prostitution and was sodomized. He felt so sad and ashamed of himself as he had lost his self-esteem totally.

For these poor and forsaken children, KDM has given them a ray of hope and an opportunity to get them off the streets. However, KDM needs additional help and dedicated volunteers, and hence a collaboration with Happy Angels.

In this joint community service with KDM, Happy Angels sent 23 volunteers to Cileungsi, Indonesia in a 4-day education program. The objectives of the project were:

• to teach the children basic English • to educate them on first aid and personal hygiene • to educate them on personal etiquette • to motivate and encourage the children through outward-bound programs on trust & team-building

The aim of the project is to boost the confidence level and raise the self-esteem of the children. Through this program the children also learn the different cultures from people of other countries.