Celebrating Keram Kids Club
Written by Hannah Stapleton
After several months of planning, our inaugural Keram Kids Club was a big success! There is no school in Yamen 2 and we had a huge turnout of over 80 children each day from Tuesday to Friday, ranging from 3 year olds to teenagers. Managing this age range and number was not an easy task, but such a great problem to have. The kids were so excited, so engaged and so attentive to every instruction they were given. None of them wanted to miss a second of it. Their sheer joy in learning and having fun together was so wonderful to see. We did a range of activities, including tracing our hands to practice our fine motor skills, picking up rubbish around the village (hygienically of course!), box-breathing to manage stress and negative emotions, reading stories, singing, playing with a parachute and team games (which was certainly a crowd favourite). This culminated in a performance of ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ at the VBA graduation ceremony. The kids were very proud and excited to perform for the community.
On Tuesday morning we announced that we would start the sessions at 9 o’clock and run until lunchtime, but it didn’t fully occur to me until I was eating breakfast the next day watching them walk past the LC house to our meeting spot that the kids didn’t have a way to know the time! They were arriving as early as 7:30am to make sure they didn’t miss the opportunity to participate in the program. Many kids were also walking from neighbouring village of Yamen 1 for over an hour to join us. What a tremendous display of patience and dedication. I was also totally blown away by how attentive they were. Have studied primary school teaching myself I know what a rare and precious thing it is to have 100% attention from every child in the room. Every eye in the room was always on the team as we explained the next activity!
We ended the activities at lunch time as it is extremely hot and humid. However, in the late afternoon I often saw groups of kids gather and play the games that we had taught them that day. Jenn also told me that she had heard them singing ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’! To hear them laugh and to know that the joy they got from learning these things would last long after we left was very special.
We are also had a number of requests from parents and young adults in the community to learn to facilitate activities like this for kids in the future. We look forward to hopefully doing a ‘train the trainer’ workshop to empower them to do so on our next trip. We also very much hope that this will become like our Care Groups program, where ownership and drive passes to the community, and the project becomes sustainable. But our even bigger hope is that this project can be used to advocate for and support improved access to school and qualified teachers in the region. These kids are the future – they could be leaders, teachers and health workers. But to do that, they need education.
Thanks to my co-facilitators, Rahab, Naomi and Gina, who took on the bulk of the instruction-giving as my Tok Pisin is limited (though I am working on it!). They were absolutely brilliant and the project would not have been the great success that it was without them. Thanks also to the mamas who joined in with the games and helped us out! A big thank you to everyone who attended our End of Year Celebration in 2025 which enabled us to purchase the resources and those who donated to ensure this trip could happen. The kids and Team Living Child send a big ‘tenkyu tumas’ to you!
If you are in a position to donate to Living Child this EOFY, we would love your support as we plan another trip for late 2026 and hope that this project can feature once again for the kids alongside Care Groups training for adults. Thank you so much!