Week 14 (& 14b): Leaving Cambodia and getting back to Singapore!

This blog is going to cover both the last week in Cambodia and the first week in Singapore since we thought it would be interesting to write about the transition.

We started this week by teaching a few "regular" (non-Xmas party) classes on Monday which was all pretty normal. On Tuesday we gave both the morning and afternoon classes at CLC end of term parties. This was basically two hours of chaotic fun with a combination of the middle and young classes. We bought and gave out snacks from the market, gave out stationary donated by the DWC volunteers, played the all-time favourites "Duck-Duck-Spider and "Whats the time Mr. Wolf?" and generally had a wild time! It was a lot of fun finishing up the "term" but I was struck by how depressed I would be in Singapore without lots of kids to brighten the day for me. The comforting thing was that all our kids seemed to grasp that we would be back in the new year. This was really important to me because I did not want them to think they would never see us again, as is the case with a lot of volunteers they meet.

I also went a little crazy with Joss's camera in the last few days, so we now have HUNDREDS of photos of the kids which will shortly appear on the blog!!

On Wednesday we packed our bags at the Red House in the morning and then went to visit the local pepper plantation with Bo and Lalin. The green pepper from this part of Cambodia is world-known for it's fantastic taste. In fact, green pepper prawns are one of our favourite dishes in Kep. In the afternoon Leron and I took the moto to the fabled Kampong Trach caves while Joss finished off the term with her Coconut Project class. The caves were absolutely fantastic! I think the natural beauty of Kampong Trach is equal to any I've seen. Unfortunately, we couldn't go into some of the caves because the monsoon season only just finished so a lot of the caves were still flooded. This, however, gives us a great reason to head back in January! In the caves that we could go into we were shown a number of natural rock formations that resemble animals or people as well as underground caves where the roots from trees come through the roof. The most interesting rock form in the cave was a group of huge stalactites that resonated when you hit them because of water eroding away the rock inside them long after they were formed. Because the size of the stalactites varied they all omitted a different sound so Leron and I had a good time banging out some tunes. I'm really looking forward to going back to the caves with Joss next year. We spent the rest of Tuesday chilling out at the Red House and relaxing with cold drinks and waffles from Kampong Trach.

Bright and early on Thursday we headed to P.P. The journey was fairly uneventful except for one very hairy moment when our bus knocked over a moto with 3 passengers and then drove over the moto! Thankfully the three passengers where thrown to the right and away from the bus and were all unscathed. In typical Cambodian style they picked up their moto, dusted themselves down and drove off as if nothing had happened. The incident certainly strengthened my resolve to NEVER drive a moto in P.P.!

The last few days in P.P. were not fantastic. Due to lack of foresight with our journey planning we ended up bumming around for a few days with not much to do! There were some nice times though, like the big party the P.P. volunteers threw in the office and catching up with Fred. The party was a lot of fun because the P.P. volunteers invited all their close Cambodian co-workers so it turned out to be a really good sendoff.

Early on Sunday morning Joss and I headed for the airport. P.P. airport is suprisingly quiet and calm. This setting after 3 months in Cambodia seems unnaturally boring! We caught our flight without any major difficulties and were shortly back home in Singapore.

The week here has been fun but rather surreal, similar to our first week in Cambodia in fact. Singapore, where everything is neat, tidy and well-organized. An air-conditioned country with more money than it knows what to do with. It's a stark contrast to Cambodia, where a huge number of people are desperately poor and keeping things tidy and well organized is near the bottom of the priority list. I am happy to be back with my family in Singapore for this short interval, but I know I will be yearning for Chamcar Bie soon!

Joss and I spent some of our first week back visiting our school to talk to the next generation of potential gap year students. This was actually very enjoyable because it was really nice to be able to share some of my experience so far. Sadly, we didn't get much one-on-one time with any students who were interested because it was the last week of term and therefore rather hectic. We also met up with all the volunteers at Mr. Morley's house one last time, which was likely to be the last time we were all together for quite a while since we are now going to disperse across the globe in totally different directions.

Many things about being back in Singapore are very strange. The sense of wealth and cleanliness. Riding around in cars instead of motos and tuk-tuks. Calling cab drivers "uncle" and saying "thankyou" or "can" instead of "okun" and "baat". All in all its a pretty strange thing being back, but im enjoying it while it's here and by the end of Xmas I will be excited to get back to CLC!

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

See you all in January!

Tom Kemeny

Week 13: Garbage and green fingers

I think it’s fair to say that this was definitely the rubbishiest week so far.

Never in my life have I seen so much rubbish as on the Saturday of our visit in Phnom Penh last weekend. Accompanied by a number of CDCC (Cambodian Dump Children Centre – where a few of the PP volunteers work) children, Tom and I and the PP volunteers visited the Phnom Penh dump. I had seen a documentary about the dump before and learnt about the health hazards and devastating living conditions the workers endure every day but even so, when I saw it in front of me, it was so surreal that it was hard to believe what I was seeing. To get to the dump we walked through the small neighbourhood of tightly packed houses cobbled together with wood, corrugated steel, tarpaulins and bricks, some of which housed some of the better-off dump workers. We followed the CDCC kids (who had come to visit their families who were still living there) along the puddly paths, trying to watch our footing. Then, suddenly turning a corner, the dump appeared in view. We stood for a few minutes just taking it all in. Mountains and mountains of trash, as tall as 3-story buildings for as far as we could see, every now and then punctuated by a small shack-like houses or a bulldozer. There was hardly a patch of earth in sight. Making our way through the dump to try and find some of the CDCC kids’ families was almost like landing on a different planet. I had left my trainers in Kep but managed to borrow a pair which I was very glad of. I’m not sure what was more worrying – looking down and seeing among the waste all the broken glass, sharp cans and syringes, or looking up and seeing the black smoke billowing from the side of one of the litter mountains, making silhouettes of the rubbish pickers. Nowhere was there relief from the dirt, the grime and the horrible fact that hundreds of men, women and even children have to work here every day breathing in the toxic fumes of burning waste, walking around – sometimes shoeless – on those mounds of squalor and earning only barely enough to get by. Following the ridge of a mound, we came to the most active part of the dump where bulldozers and rubbish trucks were at work moving and depositing litter. Apparently a significant number of people jump into the trash compactor and die in an attempt to get the best litter before anyone else gets it. We stood for a long time in the middle of this strange landscape watching the jerky movement of the machines depositing the never ending supply of trash and the bent-double shapes of garbage pickers – bag in one hand and tongs in the other. To me it seemed like the longer I stood there the stranger it became and the more helpless I felt.

However, this experience definitely put an edge on our motivation towards carrying out the anti-litter campaign in Chamcar Bei on Wednesday. Unfortunately the loudspeaker was not to be found but our students and the Youth Team did very well in handing out all the leaflets even though it was another scorching hot day. In the follow-up discussion we decided to do it again in March and to hopefully include a drama performance in the market as well as a village clean up day.

We took the morning off on Tuesday so we could do some more work around the Red House. We planted the remaining three banana trees and prepared an area for a flowerbed. While we were in PP Tom and I went with Leron to the Garden Shop where we got lots of seeds so we can start growing different kinds of fruits and vegetables. However, I think that will have to wait until we get back in January because we only have one week left until we go to Singapore.

The main purpose of our visit up to PP was to meet up with Kevin Morley to talk about the UWC scholarship application process and what we’ll be needed for. Arriving back in Chamcar Bei, we told the Youth Team applicants all they needed to know and decided to take them to Kampot today to buy some exercise books and English novels so that they can continue to practice their English while Tom and I are away in December.

As of this week I have an addition to my teaching schedule. Instead of supervising the Coconut Project from 3 – 4pm, I will be teaching another class of students at CLC from 2 – 4pm. They have roughly the same level of English as the youngest kids that we teach in the morning so it shouldn’t take much extra lesson planning. However, that class is pretty exhausting to teach. There are usually at least 25 students ranging from 4 to 8 years old and I’ve noticed that there are quite a few pretty feisty characters! Before I taught this class I used to cycle to CLC at 5pm (to teach the second Youth Team class of the day) after teaching the Coconut Project students for an hour at the UNESCO site (now renamed as the Vocational Skills Training Centre or VSTC). However, now I have to use the moto to get to all my classes on time so I take the moto to CLC at 2pm, teach CLC kids until 3:50, drive to the VSTC to teach Coconut Project students at 4pm, drive the moto back to CLC at 4:50pm to teach the Youth Team at 5pm and then drive the moto back home to VSTC at 6pm. Ay-ay-ay. I miss my 5pm cycle ride. 5pm is my favourite time of day in the village. The sun is just about to start setting so there’ll usually be a beautiful crystal clear blue sky above the crisply lit green rice paddies and trees lining the sides of the long straight red-brown dirt road which I cycle along from the VSTC to CLC. This is the village’s artery road which runs from the big main road (route 33) to the pagoda perched just above the base of the mountains from where you can look back along it and beyond it towards the sea. While I cycled along I had more time to glimpse patches of village life as the day’s work came to an end - the small children jumping off the road embankment into a big pond, the women preparing the dinner, the heads of water buffalo peeping above the surface of the small irrigation canal alongside the road as they bathe at the end of the day. There’s no electricity in the village (except for car batteries) and it’s always dark by 6pm so at 5 o’clock work stops and there’s a peaceful sense of everything winding down for the day and coming to a halt before nightfall which is often an event which fails to be noticed when it’s so easy to flick on a light and continue working until late in the night – which I did all too often in the IB!

- Joss

Week 12: Serious agriculture and visiting Phnom Penh

Sunday 23rd November 2008

Week 12 was marked by the appearance of yet another volunteer at the Red House! Leron arrived over the weekend, he is a scientist who specializes in plant science and will be helping the farmers at the UNESCO site. Fred also spent the week in Chamcar Bie but he will be heading to Siem Reap next week to see if his engineering skills will be more applicable there. Bif, Abbey and Erin were in PP this week for various reasons too.

The biggest news this week has to be the long awaited start of a proper garden at the Red House! On Tuesday we dug 14 holes and transferred 14 banana trees. This took pretty much the whole day as the earth was baked hard! The work payed off though as we now have a small banana plantation and are anxiously awaiting fruit. Leron is also helping us to develop a more varied garden. When we visited PP at the end of this week for a meeting with Kevin Morley about Cambodian scholars we all went to a The Garden Shop and bought various herbs and fruits to plant around the Red House! However, since Joss and I will be heading back to Singapore for most of December I think Leron will be doing a lot of the gardening on his own.

Teaching this week was very fun as we finally have some split pins! This meant Joss was able to make the clocks she has been dreaming of with the youngens. Another creative class we had this week was a session of leaf and bark rubbing which yielded a large multi-colored tree (that now decorates the back of the middle kids classroom). This was an extremely tiring class to teach as you might imagine since I had only one pair of scissors and over 20 kids in each class. Although I was exhausted afterward it was one of the most enjoyable lessons I've taught so far since there was a good balance between English vocabulary on nature and fun, memorable activities.

It's strange to think that in a few weeks we will be back in Singapore for almost a month! I think there will certainly be some getting-back-to-your-own-culture shock, but I am looking forward to seeing friends and family and just relaxing a little for a few weeks. However, I have no doubt that after a month I will be ready to get back to Chamcar Bie, especially since Joss and I plan to work for part of the time in order to fund some more of our gap year!

Although the Phnom Penh visit was in my week Joss would really like write about some of the things we did so I am not going to talk about that right now. Instead I will update you on the level of our Khmer! Joss and I have finally learned all the letters in the alphabet. All 23 vowels, 32 consonants and 31 "feet" or subconsonants. Now we are trying to spell all the words in our limited vocabulary, which the kids in some of my classes find very amusing. It has now become part of the routine for my afternoon class that I sing/recite the Khmer alphabet at the start of every lesson.

Thats about it for this week and I need to get on with my lesson plans!!

Bye bye!

Week 11: Water Festival week

Monday was the only day of work in Cambodia this week because on Tuesday the 3-day Water Festival began. This is one of the most spectacular festivals of the year, particularly in Phnom Penh where about 3 million people from all over Cambodia turn up to join in with all the festivities, watch the dragon-boat racing and see the city ablaze with lights. The Tonle Sap river which, with the Mekong River, flows alongside the Eastern side of Phnom Penh, is the only river in the world which flows in opposite directions at certain times of the year. The Water Festival celebrates the reversal of the flow of the Tonle Sap river when it starts to flow into Tonle Sap lake which swells to almost ten times it's volume. The lake becomes full of fish which brings in a lot of wealth for the fishermen. One of the main events is the river boating competition. Each boat can hold about 50 people and each village/town has the opportunity to represent itself in the contest.

Tom and I were originally planning to go to Phnom Penh to see all this but decided to go to Kampot instead which is not as far away and much less busy. Kampot is a pretty laid-back, quiet town where most of the buildings are shophouse-like which reminded me abit of China Town in Singapore. We were a little dissapointed because there weren't any Water Festival celebrations in Kampot. However, we still had a good time and jumped on the opportunity to eat Indian food which was delicious. We went to the zoo one day which entailed a very hazardous 30 minute tuk tuk ride along the most potholed road I've ever been along. The zoo was of course nothing like Singapore Zoo. It's set on the side of a large hill and most people (of which there weren't many) went around by moto. They had quite a number of animals, particularly birds and apes, but, not surprisingly, the enclosures seemed a bit small.

Anyway, going back to our one day of teaching - Monday was not the most productive day ever as you might imagine. It turned out that it was the monthly test day which we weren't expecting to happen until next week. Unfortunately this was also the day that we had planned for the Youth Team to come into the CLC middle kids' class to teach them about the problems of litter pollution and to help them to make posters about it. The plan is for these students to join in with the campaign as we walk around the village. The test only lasted for half the lesson so we still managed to get some nice colourful posters made by the end of the lesson. Afterwards, Tom and I walked around the market taking photos of rubbish to put in the campaign leaflet.

In the late afternoon we were invited to Lalin's house for a party. Most of his family was there as well as some of our other Youth Team friends and some of Lalin's neighbours. Seng, his mother, had cooked some delicious food which I can only really describe as Cambodian tacos.

By Friday we were back in the BAB office in Kep where we had a meeting with Savoeurn and Theary. We hadn't met with Savoeurn for some time so we had quite a lot to talk about including building the basketball court and organising the litter pollution campaign. Speaking of the basketball court - our Mum's are holding a fundraiser bake sale at the ISIBL basketball finals at UWCSEA next Saturday where you can buy pieces of court by the square foot. So if you'd like to help us to bring basketball to Chamcar Bei, please don't hesitate to go along! Click on 'comments' at the bottom of this post to find out exact details.

During the meeting we also looked through a big bag of teaching supplies that the Canadian DWC group had donated to CLC. We found a lot of very useful items ad made a list of some other items which we still need. Tom and I will be trying to gather some more equipment (see the list on the right) while we're back in Singapore in December. If you have anything you would like to donate, please let us know before we fly back to Cambodia on 6th January. A-kun j'ran! (Thank you very much!)

Week 10: Not so quiet at the Pteas Krohorm!

Week 10 was supposed to be marked by Val and PJ leaving to Vietnam and the Red House being once more devoid of people. However, on Wednesday we found out that Fred will actually be working in Chamcar Bei (not Takeo), Abbey will be working for 2 weeks per month in Chamcar Bei, Biff will be living there all the time and Erin will be spending more time here. So we now have a full house!

Teaching was pretty disrupted this week because once again it was agriculture helping time for all of our students. This meant that more than half our classes were spent outside de-weeding, ploughing and re-planting flower beds and small fields at CLC. This was really fun but unfortunately meant that what class time we had tended to be disrupted and full of fidgeting xp. Teaching the teachers and youth team members was good this week, since they were not as involved with the agriculture. The youth team started reading novels with Joss and I which everybody seemed to enjoy. We are also nearly ready to launch the youth team campaign for keeping Chamcar Bei litter free. We are projecting that the day campaign itself will take place some time in late November. The youth team members have all been fantastic so far and we are now expanding the project so that some of our younger students can also get involved.

Thursday night marked PJ and Val's last night in the Red House and the first night for Abbey, Biff and Fred so we celebrated by inviting over several of our youth team friends and throwing a small surprise party for the new volunteers. Using our new coldbox we were able to have cold beers and cokes which, in Chamcar Bei, is a pretty big luxury! It was a nice send-off for PJ and Val and everybody (especially the youth team members) really enjoyed themselves.

On Friday Joss and I made a first trip to Rabbit Island, which was a nice way to regain some energy after a tiring few weeks of teaching (I taught roughly 100 hours in October). While we are teaching it doesn't seem at all tiring but once we get home after a few days I certainly feel pretty worn-out. Next week we will also get a good chance to recooperate since it is the Water Festival and we therefore get almost the entire week off.

Still loving it here!

Tom Kemeny

Week 9: The tourist season comes to an end

The tourist season at the Red House seems to have come to an end for now so this weekend Tom and I are enjoying the chance to finally recharge our batteries. We waved my family off from CLC on Tuesday at the end of their very successful visit to Cambodia. We had a great time showing them around and getting them to join in with some of our classes. I got my 12-year old brother Harry to stand at the front of my class of youngest students who then stuck body part post-its all over him which was very entertaining. We also took them to see the view from the pagoda, jump in the reservoir and gave George and Harry the full Red House experience as they stayed with us there for 2 nights which was great :) I reckon Tom and I should get part-time jobs as tour guides in Chamcar Bie because whenever we show people around they seem to really enjoy it. Or perhaps it would be more fair if I put that down to how awesome it is here! In fact, while wondering what to do with our advanced teacher training class (which will now be renamed as the Youth Group class) we came with the idea, or more truthfully my Mum came up with the idea, of getting them to plan a tour of the village and make brochures to advertise it. Quite a number of Youth Group members we've met have said that they want to be tour guides when they finish school so they were quite interested in the activity.

I had quite a fun few lessons with my youngest student class at the beginning of the week. I found some magazines and cut out some arms, legs, heads and bodies so they could make Misfits on Monday to wrap up the topic of 'the body'. Then on Tuesday I taught them how to make origami paper hats and introduced the next topic 'clothes'. Unfortunately the hat lesson got a bit chaotic towards the end as I was giving them each a sticker to stick on their hats. I ended up nearly drowning in my students as they clambered over each other to try and get one more sticker. Our middle class has also been studying 'the body' although at a higher level so we started teaching them illnesses on Thursday.

I reckon my Mum enjoyed helping Tom out during one of his less advanced teacher training classes (now renamed as just the Teacher Training class) when he was teaching them how to understand recipe instructions and how to write a recipe. I don't think many of the women here look at recipes when they cook as the instructions are just passed on by word of mouth. This made it a little difficult for them to grasp the concept but with my Mum and Tom's help most of them understood eventually.

One of the highlights of my week though, was at the end of my Coconut Project class on Wednesday when two or three of the girls came up to the board and wrote down a few words that they had learnt to spell outside class. They were quite random words like 'dare' but nevertheless it was great to see them being confident enough to come to the front of the class and show everyone else what they had learnt because they were so extremely shy when I first started teaching them. One of the words was 'crazy' which was quite funny because it's one of Sara and Reat's favourite words. They can spend the whole hour from 3 to 4pm (when I hang out at the Coconut Project with them) saying 'Sara you crazy!', 'No! Reat you crazy! Teacher, you say "Reat you crazy"!' I always enjoy their silly joking and there's no doubt they like to hang around with me as they even came up to see me at the Red House on Wednesday and Thursday after lunch and stayed until I went to the Coconut Project with them at 3pm. Skoout na! (Very crazy!)

Valerie and PJ (or PP as all the Coconut Project people call him now) finally managed to find something else to do besides the monotonous job of scraping paint off the UNESCO buildings and went to help the DWC volunteers to build a house for some Family Dream village members who had finally managed to save up enough money to afford a better house. The DWC group have also nearly finished our outhouse kitchen (left) although the rest will be done by some of the villagers as the DWC group are leaving tomorrow. Val and PJ leave next weekend and it turns out that Fred, the engineer volunteer who was going to come to live with us, has been placed in Takeo (the nextdoor province) instead of in Kep province. We also thought that Elizabeth, another volunteer, was supposed to have arrived by now but she's not here yet so it looks like it'll be just Tom and me again in the Red House in a week's time.

Last night at the Riel bar we met a man called Stefan who owns the Botanica guesthouse in Kep. Tom mentioned that he's planning to set up a basketball court and train up a team in Chamcar Bie and by the end of the evening Tom had a contact for someone who would lay down some concrete and do some welding as well as Stefan's offer as an assistant coach. He even offered to help continue the coaching after we leave which would obviously be fantastic. Speaking of basketball, Tom and I went down to an orphanage down the road (in Kep city) yesterday where they have a basketball hoop. No more than 5 minutes after he'd started playing, most of the orphanage kids were on the court playing with him while I played games with a group of them with a beachball. They all asked us to come back again so we'll definately rock up again next weekend!

So Tom's basketball plans are progressing nicely. I've decided to try harder to put more time into my yoga because when Elizabeth comes I'm going to hopefully help her to set up yoga classes in the village. Another up and coming sporting event is the annual Kep Half-Marathon, 10K Run and 10K Bike Ride in February 2009. This is a fund raising event to raise money to support Bridges Across Borders' projects in Chamcar Bie. The aim is to sustainably provide improvements to the quality of life of the villagers, particularly in terms of their health and education. For example, if you decided to do the Bike Ride, locally supplied bikes are provided and, at the end of the ride, all the bikes are donated to the villagers so more people have transport to get to school. This is important because some people live too far away from school to be able to get there by foot. If you're living in Singapore and are interested in participating, here is a fact sheet from last year's run (sorry, haven't got anything about the 2009 event yet):

http://www.babsea.org/Images/docs/Kep_Event_2008_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Tom and I are hoping to join in so maybe we'll see you there!

Week 8: The times they are a-changin

Hello! Many changes this week!

First off we are no longer alone in the Red House!! Erin Flynn, a nurse from oz, is now living here part time as well as two volunteers from Holland and Belgium who are only going to be staying for three weeks (Valerie and PJ). The Red House itself is also moving up in the world as we now have a generator which gives us electricity (sometimes) in the evening! And most importantly of all, we now have a HUGE cold box!

Over the next few weeks we are also going to have a group of middle-aged Canadians (DWC volunteers) building houses around the village for the Family Dream project and a new outhouse kitchen at the Red House (left). So its been rather crowded in Chamcar Bie this week! Sadly a chance appearance by the cow boys ruined our papaya plot, which Theary was NOT happy about! But that project will be rekindled next week. Basketball in Kep is well on the way now as we have two hoops, nets, balls and a group of kids interested in playing. All we are waiting for now is the concrete and the welding!

Val and PJ are currently helping to re-paint buildings in the UNESCO site which is apparently a hot and monotonous job but they may be doing agriculture work during the weeks to come! Erin endeared herself to me and Joss very fast as she plays basketball and is addicted to Milo. I'm also no longer the only one hitting my head on beams in the Red House as all residents with the exception of Joss are over six foot now. Hopefully we will all learn to duck before the house loses structural integrity. It's quite strange having people living with us now but thankfully all the volunteers we have living in the Red House permanently seem really nice and easy to get on with so I'm looking forward to being a little more social :)

Teaching this week was a bit disrupted as we were late getting in from Kep on Monday (tuk tuk problems again!) so we only had a half class in the morning and we also had to skip Thursday all together since we needed to get the bus down to PP to meet Joss's family. Several classes were also interupted by DWC volunteers wondering in and chatting to us, the students and the teachers. However, some of the lessons this week have been memorable since we have bags of shiny new teaching supplies donated by mday-oapuk roboh khnohm (my pareenttts). One such lesson was when my little kids learnt bodyparts by sticking post-it notes on Seriem, one of the Cambodian teachers, and then on each other. Thankfully it was the last activity of the class as after the floor was opened for post-it sticking it got rather chaotic. We have finally set up a full youth team project with the help of Pirom and Vanna. We will be making and distributing leaflets and posters on preserving the environment in Chamcar Bie (in English and Khmer) and hopefully going on "campaign" walks around the village as we did when promoting CLC in September.

On Thursday we travelled via bus to PP. The journey was complicated slightly by the bus initially stopping at the side of the road and asking us to wait for 30 minutes in the same spot. An hour later we called the bus company and were told to wait another 30 minutes. An hour after that the bus finally showed up and we rolled out of Kep several hours late. The consequence of this was that we were stuck in commuter traffic going into PP and didn't make it to the volunteer house until around 8 (to the great suprise of the volunteers there who didn't know we were coming). The journey up was uneventful except for the satisfaction we felt when we stopped off at the same midway point that we stopped off at when we travelled from PP to Kep for the first time and bought a coke for 1000 riel. Doesn't sound very interesting I know, but on the first trip we made down to Kep Joss and I bought two cokes at the same store for a dollar each which Vy then laughed at us for. We are no longer AS touristy!

We spent a fun Thursday night with the Ames clan at the FCC in PP eating, drinking and catching up. Friday was spent exploring PP's resturants and the royal palace and in the evening Joss and I went with the 7 PP volunteers to a rather entertaining korean karaoke bar for Antu's (a law intern who works with BAB) birthday. Fred, another new roomie at the Red house, got in from the UK on Friday but was understandably quite bushed so we will probably meet him properly on Monday. Bright and early on Saturday morning we caught the bus down to Kep where we were greated with absolutely abismal weather! We still had a nice time eating dinner at the crab market and going to the Riel bar. Unfortunately the weather on Sunday was just as bad so we decided not to go to Rabbit Island as planned (giving me time to write this blog). Instead we are going to head over to Chamcar Bie where George and Harry (Joss's younger brothers) are going to stay a few nights with us.

Week 7: Handy hints from the homeland

This week has been one full of hello's and goodbye's and starts with us waving off the Phnom Penh volunteers on Sunday afternoon. It was a shame they couldn’t have stayed longer because it was great fun having them out here and we really enjoyed showing them how life goes in Chamcar Bai and Kep. However, I’m pretty sure we’ll see some of them again because by the sounds of it they’ve fallen in love with it as much as I have. Well, almost as much. :) Anyway, we spent most of the rest of the day sitting at the Veranda with Kevin and Jane talking about how our classes are going, listening to their advice and discussing lesson plans. We got some great ideas from them and were looking forward to trying some of them out the next day in our classes while they observed us teaching.

On Monday morning we took the big BAB tuk tuk to Chamcar Bai with Kevin and Jane and, admittedly arriving a little late, began our lessons. Last week I got out the colouring pencils in my youngest class and it was a great success so I figured I’d use them again. They’d been taught the four emotions happy, sad, angry and scared the week before so I wanted them to draw pictures of what made them feel happy, sad, angry and scared. Most of them drew flowers for happy so I thought they’d understood but I suppose it was when I noticed them drawing the same for sad, angry and scared that I realised I was wrong.

At lunch time we took Kevin and Jane to see the Red House where we sat and discussed more teaching ideas over a delicious lunch prepared by Paa. Jane, who was watching my class of little kids, suggested that, because they are so young, it would be better to teach them purely through games, songs, drama activities and drawing. I took her advice the next day and got them all pretending to be suns, clouds, rain and wind. Some students were a bit scared at first and wouldn’t join in but soon enough I had an entire class of happy, excited clouds running between the desks. After singing Incy Wincy Spider and If You’re Happy and You Know It, I got them to calm down a bit by instructing them step by step to draw a face (teaching them eyes, ears nose etc along the way). I think it was the most successful lesson I'd taught that class so far.

We’ve also started teaching the advanced teachers differently, having moved on from mostly grammar-based lessons to more theme-based teaching (as suggested by Kevin). I’ve decided to start with ‘the environment’ so we’ve spent this week discussing the problems, causes, effects and solutions of litter pollution. Coincidentally, I picked up a brochure about litter pollution and beach clean-ups in Kep last weekend so I got them to read parts of that. It also gave me the idea of helping them to set up a litter pollution campaign in the village so next week they’re going to start making a leaflet and/or posters about it. I think they’ll do a good job because most of the students are Youth Group members who are very good at organizing campaigns and events in the village.

Since Kevin’s visit we’ve also been informing some of our advanced students about scholarships to UWCSEA. A number of them were very interested in finding out more about applying at the beginning of next year. I think Kevin said there’s only 1 place for a Cambodian IB scholarship to our school so the chance that one of them will receive it is slim. However, the application process will be a good experience for them and in a small way it will hopefully send a message of hope through the community when the people see that there are such opportunities for them. If some of them do decide to go ahead with applying it will be very important that they come to as many classes as possible but this is proving quite difficult now that public schools have started again. To solve this problem Tom and I have decided to teach the class at two times – at 10am and at 5pm. The evening class usually has reasonably good turnout although it does mean cycling back home in the dark!

At the Coconut Project I’ve been having a good time with Sara and Reat in particular. Sara (right) is 17 years old and Reat (below) is 14 and they’re always together. I usually sit with them while we work away at sandpapering coconut shells and they spend the greater part of the hour pointing to objects and asking: “What is it?” I'll tell them the English word for the object and then they will tell me how to say it in Khmer and will drill me on it until I pronounce it right. I only taught two Coconut Project English classes this week because of heavy rain (the waterfall was so swollen that I was afraid to get wiped off my feet when I crossed!) but I’ve started using an idea that Jane gave me. Most of the students don’t know the alphabet or the sounds each letter makes but they get bored if I teach them a lesson based solely around that. Jane suggested having a ‘Letter of the Week’, e.g. A, and that at the beginning of every class I give them a word beginning with that letter and get them to write it down and draw it. Hopefully they should eventually have a small alphabet dictionary and they’ll pick up other sounds along the way.

Unfortunately we had to say goodbye to Ifya and Unlucky, our two cats. We’re not sure why but they both died on Thursday morning after being very ill overnight. The same morning promised a flat tyre on the way to school and the beginning of a cold for me so it wasn’t the best of days. However, this weekend we have Tom’s parents to visit and so we’re enjoying little luxuries of hot showers and being able to afford steak :)

Week 6: Teaching is tiring!!

Hello!! Sorry for the delay writing this blog!! We have been rather busy! Week 6 started with us getting back to Chamcar Bie at arount lunch time on Sunday (early for us) in absolutely SCORCHING weather. We came back early because we had been invited to Saroeun's house for an afternoon visit aka English speaking practice. Saroeun is one of Joss's better coconut project students, and one of the only boys involved in the project. After meeting him at the UNESCO site we cycled to his house a few km away. En route we picked up Bol, one of the youth team members who works part time at CLC, and her little brother Reat. After an immensely sweaty 15 minutes we reached Saroeun's house and were given a brief tour while Reat was dispatched on one of our bikes to get us some water, since it's either that or boiled water for me and Joss. Saroeun's house was a perfect example of a rural Khmer household. A small house (about half the size of the Red House) built on stilts with a small table in front where Saroeun's mother sells rice wine and cigarettes as a secondary business to the family plot of land. Behind the house is an expansive rice paddy and next to the house we saw a large mound of golden unhusked rice, a stage of rice production I had not previously seen. The land around the house also contains the family cow and and group of chickens. After cooling down a bit we were introduced to Saroeun's mother who quizzed us on our age, nationality and marital status (all frequently asked questions since many people marry young here) which was a fun opportunity to practice our Khmer. We then spent a few hours chatting both in Khmer and English with Bol, Reat and Saroeun with much laughing over our Khmer mistakes and their English ones.

Sadly the pond is getting shallower with the lack of rain so our shower isn't quite as nice, but we finally embarked upon the long awaited Red House agriculture project. We have so far ploughed and levelled two small plots of land, one for our papaya tree and one that will be used for sunflower experiments or bananas. With only one hoe the going was pretty slow so hopefully more gardening will be done next week!

This turned out to be a week of teaching breakthroughs as well since Joss discovered the way to the hearts of our young class (colouring pencils) and we also inadvertantly organized a new class! Which means I'm now teaching 7 hours a day! Yay! The new class was created because we were teaching Lalin after school since he couldn't make the normal class that day and a lot of people wandered in and asked if they could join in as well. Since the turnout was so good we decided to make 5 - 6pm a permanant class. The only draw back is that we cycle home at dusk and consequently collect a large amount of insect life with our faces. The flavour for this weeks teaching was directions. We taught a similar theme at different levels for the middle class, the less advanced teachers and Joss's coconut project (below) class. This proved to be a enjoyable subject for both the students and the teachers as we came up with some really fun "active learning" exercises - basically a task that involves standing up and doing something enjoyable! These activities involved my middle kids directing each other around a maze of desks or Joss blindfolding her coconut students and directing them towards something, or in one case out the classroom door! We finished off basic tenses with the advanced class of teachers, which took a little longer than expected due to the arrival of a non-youth team student who we had to recap a few things for. Savan, our new advanced teacher, is a teacher from the CLC-related primary school near the pagoda. He intitially joined the less advanced class but was clearly wayyyy ahead in terms of his English so we moved him up to the advanced class after one lesson. We also realized towards the end of this week that teaching grammar-based classes to a group full of youth team members wasn't the best way to teach. So next week we plan to teach classes that are more topic based, the first of which will be the environment in Chamcar Bie village. The plan is to teach them some basic environmental awareness at first and eventually develop this topic into a youth team campaign. Teaching the children seems to get better every week! Every lesson you come to school thinking the kids can't possible be any MORE enthusiastic and every lesson you are surprised. It seems that now the students have accepted that I'm coming back every week and teaching them (rather than passing through for a week or two as is the case with many foreigners they meet), they can really get involved in my classes. Every task I set that involves coming up to the board or contributing in some way will have most of the class jumping out of their seats because they want to give it a go! Some times kids will volunteer for a task when they really don't feel confident about the correct answer, and just try and work it out when they get to the board. The confidence and enthusiasm these kids bring to class makes our job even more fullfilling and enjoyable. Occasionally I actually feel a little guilty because I know when I was that age I didn't make it so easy for my teachers. Hopefully at uni I will remember how nice it is for a teacher when you engage 100% all the time rather than slacking off the odd class because you're having a rough day.

Khmer class is going great! Theary is now teaching us the Khmer alphabet which is TOUGH!!! There are over 30 consonants and 22 vowels, not to mention a whole new brand of letter that is translated as a "leg". The consonants go on the middle of the line while the vowels can go above, below, to the left or to the right of them. The legs, as you might expect, hang down below the consonants as well. So at all times there are three levels to a line of Khmer writing, which means you have to read from left to right AND up and down from time to time. VERY CONFUSING!! But we are still learning more vocab, which is easier to apply straight away since we get to practice it when teaching, buying stuff at the market or talking to Paa.

Thursday night we saw Vy for the first time since arriving in Kep which was really nice.On Friday the volunteers from P.P. showed up outside the Kep office (a day early) because they didn't want to take the bus all the way to Kampot after the long drive from P.P. - fair enough! This was nice since we had a little extra time to take them to the crab market, seaside sailing club (right), Veranda and Riel Bar that evening. On Saturday, after a lovely breakfast (and of course ice-cream) at the Veranda we met up with Mr. Morley and headed out to Chamcar Bie in two local tuk-tuks. Joss took one group who managed to get all the way to the Pteas Krohorm (Red House) without breaking down. Unfortunately the tuk-tuk with me, Seb, Vy, Jamie and Mr. Morley in it didn't. The trip seemed to take forever since we broke down three or four times and changed tuk-tuk once. Since we took so long to get to the Red House and even longer to get everybody moving once we were there we had to skip the pagoda and go straight to CLC and the resevoir. All the P.P. volunteers loved swimming in the reservoir (left) as we got there at the perfect time of day, around 5pm, when the sun is just going down and the light is most beautiful. We had a great time swimming there before heading back to the Red House for a feast cooked by Paa. It seems like all the P.P. volunteers, some of whom were initially a little unsure about living in rural Cambodia, really fell in love with Kep just like me and Joss. Of course as you will find out if you ever make it out here, its hard NOT to fall in love with this place!

We had a nice weekend catching up with everybody and are really looking forward to my parents coming to visit next weekend! Of course we are going to be pretty busy from now on because next weekend we have my parents, the weekend after we have Joss's and the weekend after that some more volunteers are coming to live with us in the Red House!

Lots to look forward to and be excited about!