Another day on the road and 6 more hours of driving to visit our various projects sustained from our volunteer camp located with Bongkud Village. The drive has been worth it and impressive to see the progress that has been made. We are building a community centre, gravity water feed system, micro enterprise initiative for the single women’s group and have located a beautiful new permanent camp location at the end of our jungle trek.

Apologies for the cheesy Directors shots but gives you a feel for the scale of the community centre build.

Our school expeditions and gap year volunteers have dug this out by hand and laid the foundations for a water tank that will deliver fresh spring water to 20% of the community. Next stage will be to make bricks using the techniques we have developed at Camp Kenya from the mud.

Sometimes its the small projects that have impact and the guys have done a great job with this small Kindergarten.

This was a dilapidated shed….it is now a place for the single Mums to meet, make handicrafts, grow vegetables and develop a small micro enterprise.

Thanks for a great lunch (Camp Manager Eve) and great to see the team again.

Great to be back in the field visiting our projects in Borneo. Simon is over from Africa and combined with Matt and Rory we are reviewing all our camps and projects, sharing lessons from across the globe and of course staying in some pretty terrible hotels.

Fendi is having to put up with 4 Directors talking non stop for 6 hours driving every day.

The Kindergarten build is coming along well in Tinangol village but need to turn up the heat and raise essential funds.

Camp Manager Zul and his team have our long house looking spectacular and we have decided to build an additional long house in the same location to accommodate more volunteers and bring more hands to our projects in the area.

If you think our bedrooms in the long house look basic….you should see the Hotel Rory has booked us into! Out here for one week to include Cambodia so more to follow……

Ok so we are not quite at the end of the year, and are currently hosting several Australian school teams in Borneo,  but this week we staged our end of year party for all staff.  Its an annual tradition to get together and have some fun, usually centred around some dancing (both cultural and “modern”) and some singing (normally a mix of dreadful and amazing karaoke renditions).  This year there was the added twist of fancy dress (super heros meets cultural attire) – more about that and some embarrassing pictures in another blog I am sure!  So we managed to get nearly all our camp staff down into Kota Kinabalu (which is no mean feat!) for the evening and had circa 60 people present.  Normally the gathered crowds have to endure a speech from yours truely and this year was no exception – although i thought this year i would keep it simple with a summary of the year in numbers.  I have copied it here for people to see the size of the operation we are now running in Borneo:

Total number of pax coming through Borneo = 764

Total number of days spent in our camps = 14,936

Total number of days spent working on our projects = 7,613

Total different nationalities = 19

(Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Belgian, Australian, British, Pilipino, American, New Zealand, Botswana, Ghana, German, Bruneian, Japanese, Indian, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Malaysian, Korean)

Total welcoming and leaving dances danced = 117

Litres of water drunk = 59,744

Meals cooked = 44,808

Rubbish collected from beaches on Mantanani = 320 kg

Litres of air used doing scuba diving = 98,600

Trees planted = 8600

Money spent on our community projects = RM 97,300

Money spent in direct support to these projects & locally within Sabah = RM 2,850,000

There are some pretty juicy numbers here and it illustrates the hard work the team have put in this year as well as some of the great achievements we have done.  And whilst the figures are impressive my main message to the team was not to loose that little special something that everyone experiences when they come to Borneo – that special feeling of being part of the family, part of the community, mucking in and sharing those great little moments with people.  Thats what makes Borneo such a special place and the staff we have such mind blowingly awesome people – they work hard of course but they are willing to share and welcome people into their lives and families.