I am pleased to introduce the second of the JWOC Scholarship Student “guest authors” for my blog.  Tivecheka is a confident, articulate and truly impressive young woman who volunteers as one of the loan officers on our Microfinance team and will graduate from college later this month.  We met and talked quite a bit on Loan Disbursement Day, and I thought you would appreciate hearing her story!  

My name is Tivecheka Ting. I’m 23 years old and I am sixth child among my seven siblings. There are two brothers and five sisters in my family. Nowadays, my father is a retired teacher and now he is getting old, so he has nothing to do. My mother also getting old and now she sells some vegetables at the market, and outside from her small business she look after her grandchild and also a housewife. I came from Battambang province where Cambodia and Thai border.

Now I’m living in Siem Reap town for six years already. I’m studying in Year IV, Semester II and my major is Accounting & Finance. I will graduate in July,2014 next month. I prefer to run my own business in the future if it is possible, but short term plan I want to be an accountant or general operations and so on.

I am a university scholarship student at JWOC since Oct, 2010. During I get scholarship from JWOC, I must do volunteer working  for JWOC at least 5 hours to 10 hours a week. There are two projects that I already worked. First, Free Class Project as an English teacher for a year and now working as a loan officer for Microfinance Project since 2012 so far. Both of these projects, I got difference experience. When I under the Free Class Project as an English teacher, I worked every Monday to Friday at 5: 15 pm to 6:15 pm with all kind of students. And now I under Microfinance Loan Project, I work only on every Sunday at 1:30 pm to 5pm with villagers (borrowers). Some days I have to volunteer working more as my Project Manager requires.

Volunteer working with JWOC, I got a lot of experiences such as: teaching experience, time management, how to do lesson plan, how to manage students during the class and so on. And working with Microfinance Loan Program, I’ve got a lot of experiences such as: how to do loan application, how to interview borrowers, know borrowers living style situation in the village, know what kind of business do they run and how is going on while borrowing money from JWOC, and how much their business growing after get loan and so on.

There are 10 borrowing groups and total amount of borrowers around 44 borrowers that I and my friend responsible. I chose one of the borrowers who I responsible to let you know how is her business running. Her name is Yi Channy who lives in Kvean village at Angkor Wat area. She sells all kinds of dessert in front of her house. Before she borrowed JWOC loan, her business is small and she made a little dessert for sell because of she does not has enough money to buy raw materials for making dessert. But now, she can expand her business by borrowing money from JWOC. As my experience with her I observe that her business is growing by making more dessert and making a lot than before. Now she is borrowing JWOC loan and nowadays she is 3rd term borrower also.

I like playing with kids, sight seeing, talking funny with friends, and so on. These are my fun times.

Finally, I would like to say thank you Erin for this blog. And also thank to you again for your time volunteer at JWOC in order to help poor Cambodian people.