Going to Cambodia for 3 months to work with an indigenous tribal community. I need help with sponsorship!

Dear all

Firstly I would like to thank all my readers! I have reached over 10000 hits on my blog. Which is totally unexpected but really exciting. Now I need you guys to help me out with the next venture in my life. I need help with fundraising. Share, like, donate towards my cause. I will not let you down and keep everyone updated with a written/video blog whilst I am in Cambodia. You can donate here -> http://www.justgiving.com/Sayantani-Chakravorty

Here is my story =) 

I have been selected to do a placement with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) with their youth department; International Citizen Services (ICS). ICS is backed by the UK government, the government pays a substantial amount of money to send their volunteers abroad. However the ICS placement also involves fundraising for the charity, so they can continue sending volunteers abroad to share important skills and life experiences. Fundraising also helps to raise awareness about the charity and the projects that they run. If you want to find out more about ICS go on to their website here: http://www.volunteerics.org/

Now to tell you guys more about my placement... 
I am going to Ratanakiri Province of Cambodia to work/support IP ethnic groups around the Banlung administrative town. My placement is based around the VSO livelihoods programme.

Here are the issues that the indegenous population of Banlung experience face these days:

You see, most of the indigenous populations are subsistence farmers (farming that provides for the basic needs of the farmer without surpluses for marketing). However with the pressure of commercialisation of rubber, cashew and cassava EXPLOITATION, subsistence farming is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.There is additional pressure resulting from legal and illegal logging and land right battles.

Eco-tourism is a small but developing industry in the area, this is a good opportunity for the battling farmers to move beyond subsistence farming (which is proving to be difficult) to develop small scale commercial farms. However, they lack the required understanding of small scale commercial farming techniques or marketing. Microfinance is available for the start ups, however this is currently limited by understanding of the process to obtain microfinance. 
Therefore my role in the placement is to help and work with the local farmers/villagers to implement →

1. Researching, developing and communicating good practices in the raising chickens as an alternate means of food production (protein supplement) for village use and income generation!

2. Raising awareness of the impacts of sanitations and waste management on Eco-tourism. To train and assist local organisations to manage waste around key tourist attractions.

3. Assisting in the development of 'help facilities' and support for the applicants for microfinance.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you want more information you can directly contact me here: sc34389@gmail.com.

Now I need you guys to open up your hearts and wallets and make a small donation towards my cause. I will be doing several mini projects to help fundraise my total target amount of £1500 but I need your help to raise the amount which will enable me to go to Cambodia. I will cherish and be thankful for every donation being made to help improve a wonderful community in Cambodia.

If you are unable to makee a donation here on justgiving, because you are abroad (not in th UK). This goes out to all my international friends. Please get in touch with me via Facebook or email and we can solve this little problem =)

Donate @ http://www.justgiving.com/Sayantani-Chakravorty

Lots of love 
Sayantani 

Neem face mask

Well, over the past few months I have been absolutely rubbish at writing new blog posts. Partly because I was feeling uninspired and partly because I have been extremely busy. But mainly because I was feeling rather uninspired !

But then I took a long two months holiday/trip to India and suddenly inspiration kicked in, in bountiful. India is a country full of trees and plants of different nature. One of which is Neem, Neem is indigenous to India and has many medicinal and beauty benefits.

To make it easy I will name the key beauty benefits in bullet points:

• Treats skin infections
• Addresses acne problems 
• Good skin toner 
• Opens up skin pores
• Also tackles dry skin 

So I put the claims to test, luckily I had a humungous Neem tree growing in my back garden in Delhi. So I got the gardener to get me a handful of Neem leaves and I simply crushed the leaves into a pulp and mixed it with rose water.

And then put it all over my and my little cousins faces (she is going to hate me for this)

Firstly we thought that the bright green colour would stain our skin and we would end up looking like Shrek, so we washed it fairly quickly (after 10mins). But to our relief our skin was not at all stained, in fact my skin felt really nice and clean, and most amazingly in only ten minutes time my skin felt tight and bouncy! So it the mixture worked wonders as a toner too!

Happy with the benefits, I continued using my Neem face mask (applying it for 20mins at a time now) throughout my time in India, which really helped me combat sticky monsoon season without breaking out in boils !