Welcome to Bali

I’m coming to the end of my fourth day in Bali but I feel like I’ve been here for weeks. The main reason for my trip to Bali is to do some work with the organisation Stella’s Child, founded by Tim Cameron who I’m also staying with. Tim is the cousin of a friend of mine and we met briefly in Copenhagen last year while he was visiting Europe to do some outreach work. Stella’s Child aims to equip underprivileged children in Bali with important life skills that they wouldn’t otherwise learn in school or university. Tim’s set up a rigorous entrepreneurship programme for the children at Widhya Asih orphanage and it’s something that I truly believe in. His enthusiasm is contagious and I was thrilled to visit the orphanage and meet the team on my first evening here.

Meeting the students was such a treat and I am delighted to have the chance to work with children again, albeit for a limited time. The students, aged 12 - 19, are full of excitement and enthusiasm for their weekly evening classes with Tim and his volunteers: it is a wonderful atmosphere at the orphanage. Many of them have very limited English, but they are all eager to learn and communicate. My arrival almost coincided with the biggest event of the students’ year: a gala to launch the products they have designed as part of their business training. They had all worked incredibly hard to put the event together - the whole affair was almost completely student led. There was singing, dancing, a fashion show and a raffle and the children were extremely excited by it. Sadly, I missed the event by one week but was lucky to be involved in the debrief. It was very difficult to extract anything but positive feedback from them and it took a lot of coaxing before they finally revealed a few things they had been disappointed with. They had apparently all prepared answers (in English) to questions they were likely to be asked but had been disappointed if the guests hadn’t been interested in hearing what they had prepared. They had been shocked to learn that not all of the guests were friendly and nor did people arrive on time. The disappointments they expressed were very telling and helped me come up with some ideas for the customer relations workshop I’ll be leading in a few weeks time.

As well as visiting the orphanage, I have been shadowing Tim as he attends meetings and takes part in conference calls, the idea being that I take on his role in just under two weeks time while he is away in Europe for four weeks. We met the president of the Seminyak rotary club one day and were both invited to the rotary club lunch meeting on Wednesday to hear more about another orphanage on an isolated island that is sponsored by the rotary club and with whom Tim is hoping to implement a similar programme to the one already in place here. The idea is that I would visit the orphanage with a rotary club member in the coming weeks to get a better idea of what’s possible in terms of a distance learning programme.

We also had a conference call with two incredibly impressive students at the Singapore American School who, through their presidency of the Indonesian club at school, want to earn service hours for offering help in any way they can to the programme. At the moment, they are working on translating some lesson plans into Indonesian and they had many other ideas for how people in their club could help - they suggested a mentoring programme using Skype where students from the international school would buddy up with students at the orphanage. I’m going to try to get that up and running while Tim is away. Finally, we met social media analyst Nike, a recent business graduate from Nottingham University who has returned now to Bali and is going to give a number of workshops over the coming weeks at the orphanage. I look forward to working more with her.

Home-made light reflector project.

Stella's Child Photoshoot at Petitenget Beach, Seminyak, Bali.

I’ve been having great fun with Tim, whose life seems so fun and entertaining to me. Yesterday morning, for example, there was to be a photo shoot using the products the children had designed: Tim has a contact in New York who hopes to set up a contract with Macy’s and possibly even Barneys. It was all kind of thrown together at the last minute, with Tim only deciding the day before to have models wear the products rather than just photographing them in the sand. Remembering my own brief modelling career in Corsica one summer, I mentioned, half in jest, that he would need a light reflector and that we should actually make one. My idea was laughed across the beach (where we were having our ‘meeting’) until Tim googled it and proceeded to become very excited at the prospect. We thus spent Friday night scooting around Seminyak for supplies and then making our very own light reflector (while sipping Margaritas and listening to Donna Summer!). Much fun and we were very proud to try it out the next day at the photoshoot!