Week 4: The first full week

Friday 26th September 2008

Hello! We started the week back in Chamcar Bai a little earlier than usual this Sunday as we were meeting Bo and Lalin from the youth group for a trip to the village pagoda. We ended up reaching CLC to meet Lalin at around 4 which was a little later than planned since we were attempting to blitz out some more washing beforehand. Once we arrived and met Lalin and Bo we were promptly escorted to Lalin's family's house which was just outside the main marketplace of Chamcar Bai. Upon reaching Lalin's house we were given amazingly fresh and HUGE coconuts that we could barely finish! We also met Lalin's mother, step sister and little brother (who as it turns out is one of my younger students). After meeting Lalin's family we rode a few kilometers out of the market place toward the village pagoda on the back of Lalin and Bo's motos. Lalin and I came very close to running over fairly large snake which had picked that moment to cross the road.

The village pagoda can be seen from almost anywhere in the village, including all the way back at the Red House. It is a large red building, perched majestically on the hillside so it overlooks the village, farms and houses for many kilometers. The path up to the pagoda is much too steep to ascend on a moto so the last part must be done on foot. Bo jokingly told me that this is the reason people at the pagoda are usually relatively young as older villagers don't like the mini-hike to the top of the hill. However, based on the oldest villagers I've met so far there is very little truth in this as the people here are incredibly fit regardless of age. Also, anybody who has been up to the pagoda would most certainly be willing to expend the energy in exchange for the vista that awaits upon reaching the top. Since it was such a clear afternoon the view extended well beyond the outskirts of Chamcar Bai all the way to the sea, which we believe is over 20 kilometers away. At the top Joss was extremely annoyed that she had not brought her good camera on the walk, and promptly promised to drag me up there in the wee hours of the morning to catch the sunrise on camera (the sun rises as around 5am here - oh yay!). After taking in the view we were introduced to the young monk who maintains the pagoda, who offered to show us the paintings on the inside walls of the pagoda. So with some translation from Bo and Lalin, we were given verbal captions to all the beautiful paintings depicting some of Buddha's many stories. By the time we were done looking at the paintings it was almost time for dinner back at the Red House so we got back as quickly as possible. Lalin came with us to see what it was like and how to get there so he could come and visit for possible extra English lessons later, which turned out rather well because as he was talking to Paa in the kitchen Joss and I spotted the biggest centipede imaginable (around 10 inches long and an inch across). We pointed this out to Lalin and were treated to the spectacle of him grabbing the offending centipede with kitchen tongs and trying to shove it into a small plastic water bottle, accompanied by the centipede's hissing and writhing. After capturing the insect Lalin explained that the bites can be extremely painful and that his uncle also collects these insects to use in traditional medicine. After an eventful afternoon we were very ready for dinner and bed.

Monday marked the start of Cambodian public schools so when we arrived at CLC in the morning we found that Joss's intermediate class was almost non-existent. This worked out ok though as we were supposed to be observing the first class anyway, so we just watched Sariem teach my young class. After this we had our first teacher training classes with the seperate groups, me teaching the less advanced class on Monday and Tuesday and Joss teaching the advanced class. This division proved to be a great idea as both classes were able to learn with out being bored or lost, and as a result of this all the students seemed to progress faster. The variation of teaching is also fun for me and Joss. On Monday, in my afternoon class I discovered that I actually teach Paa's kids (see Joss's week 3 entry) and that they are some of the most enthusiatic kids in the class, which in the classes here is no small feat. Joss also invented a more interesting way of learning nature vocab. We took the young class outside after teaching them basic nature vocab and then played a game that revolved around Joss or me writing a word on a hand held chalk board or saying it and an ensuing mad dash as the kids ran to touch whatever the word was (eg tree, grass, sky). Teaching my intermediate class 'What's the Time Mr. Wolf?' was a fun way of practising time and was met with similar chaos as the front kids were often trampled by their peers. Of course, being Cambodian kids, any child that was trampled would immediatly bounce back up laughing at how funny the game was.

Since we started doing the teacher training classes I have found that the quality of my other classes seems to be improving. I think this is a combination of me getting more used to teaching here, the children getting more used to me and also the fact that I am interacting much more with the Cambodian teachers who are assisting me during my classes. Initially, for whatever reason, it felt like the teachers felt slightly awkward and less confident around me and this definitely affected how much they would interact with me during lessons. But this seems to have changed rapidly and now the teaching at CLC seems to be moving forward all the time! This coupled with the fact that Savoeurn has given us more interesting projects to get on with at the weekend makes it feel like everything here is really moving in the right direction.

Wednesday night marked the most epic Cambodian storm we have seen so far, and as luck would have it, it hit just as we were rinsing our soapy clothes in the pond. Since we were already pretty wet we decided to carry on with our washing when it started raining, and the rain quickly intensified into a full-on monsoon downpour. Being the strange people we are we both found this immensely funny. This was vocalized when Joss pointed out: "Imagine where we might be right now if we weren't on our gap year - we might be in a warm dorm room somewhere in the UK mildly drunk and half way through freshers week!" We both laughed again and talked about how pleased we were to be here, in the pissing rain soaked to the bone hand-washing clothes in a lily pond.

Thursday morning started bright and early with most of the village a few inches underwater (hence the houses on stilts). As it turned out Thursday morning was the youth group's rally to get more children from Chamcar Bai to attend school. While CLC gets a very good turn out there are still plenty parents who think working in the farm all day is more important than attending school for a few hours a day as well as helping out at home. So the youth group organized a big walk through tracks, fields and bogs to spread the word with banners and a megaphone. As it turned out, the classes Joss and I would have been teaching decided to come along so we ended up with a huge procession of youth group members, teachers, students and ourselves walking throught the MUDDIEST fields known to man. The whole experience was extremely fun though, and gave birth to the instant-classic game 'match the tall guy's strides'!

After the walk the youth team put on a comical drama production in the market place which revolved around Lalin being left behind as a farmer by his friends because of his mother's wishes while his friends all attend school. Eventually Lalin's friends encourage his mother to relent and they all attend school and have successful lives. Even though the performance was in Khmer with a little translation from Theary it was very enjoyable.

After lunch we were supposed to practice our moto driving before making the 45 minute trip down to Kep but the rain had really kicked up again so we were forced to postpone this for a few hours. By the time we had practiced and felt ready to make the drive it was already dusk so we decided to leave early the next morning instead. The next morning brought a hot day, blue sky and no moto where we had left it by the house. For 30 terrifying minutes we ran around the countryside looking for it reasoning that nobody could have wheeled a moto (we had the keys) very far. After half an hour we had just about given up and decided to cycle to the village and ask for help from friends there. On the way past we noticed our neighbour/security guard cleaning up a familiar moto near the entrance to the UNESCO site. It turned out he had worried about leaving it out overnight and had moved it into an empty classroom. Very relieved we set out, 14 hours late, for Kep city. After a relatively uneventful ride we reached Kep, where Theary did a great job of pretending he hadn't worried about our lateness.

Tomorrow morning we head off to Sihanoukville to meet the rest of the volunteers from PP as we get Monday and Tuesday off for Pchum Ben Day.

Thanks for reading my novel-lengthed post!

Cheers!

Week 3: Settling in

Friday, 19th September 2008

According to our weekly schedules, our Fridays will be spent at the BAB office in Kep where we'll be doing office work and having feedback meetings with the BAB education officer, Savoeurn, and our volunteer coordinator, Theary. After getting back down to Kep with the two of us on the back of Theary's moto, it turned out that there wasn't any office work for us to do last Friday. However, we did meet with Savoeurn and he had more than enough for us to think about!

During the meeting he explained to us that he needs our help and feedback, from teaching at CLC, in order to help him improve the education system and teaching capacity in Chamcar Bai. For now he's asked us to do some teacher observations to find out some of the strengths and weaknesses of the teachers so he can target these problems in a teacher training workshop which we will be helping to construct some time next month. A number of other things he wants us to think about are the relevance of the text books they use (which are not all that great as Tom and I have already noticed), additional education programmes such as sports, teaching aids and materials, scoring systems and classroom management. I came out of the meeting feeling really glad that Savoeurn is asking us to help him do this as I want to get involved as much as possible with BAB's community development projects while I'm here. I'm sure the ELT course which Mr. Morley ran has given me some basic ideas and knowledge which will be useful to pass on to Savoeurn and I think Tom and I will enjoy drawing up more of our own ideas as we continue to teach and immerse ourselves within the village community. We're definitely up to the challenge!

Savoeurn also asked us if we'd like to get involved with some agricultural work on the plot of land around the Red House. Of course we thought that was an awesome idea so we're setting aside Tuesday afternoon to start preparing some land for growing some fruits and vegetables!

Friday was also when we met Paa, who is now our cook! She makes us really delicious Khmer food and is always smiling. She also has 3 young daughters who came to the Red House one day and made us play blindfolded tag with them.

On Saturday we also met up with JC and some of her friends from the UK while they were in Kep for a couple of days so after an out of the ordinary weekend we had a relatively uneventful start to the week back in the village. Arriving at CLC on Monday morning we were met by empty classrooms and were told that there would be no classes that day or the next because of a child protection workshop. So we turned back to go home where Paa laughed at us trying to handwash our clothes. Here's a photo of where we rinse the clothes and shower. We're managing pretty well so far without running water and electricity. We have a big bucket with a filter in it which we fill up from the pond. It runs pretty slowly but after boiling it it's safe enough to drink so we've stopped bothering to buy 12-packs of water for drinking. We've had a number of Khmer lessons from Theary now which have been incredibly useful, especially at the little market next to the school. We're finding it really easy to pick up Khmer, especially now that we're usually forced to have to use it because there are very few people who can speak English in the Chamcar Bai.

Khmer has also come in handy while I've been teaching English to the Coconut Project ladies in the afternoons. They speak absolutely NO English at all (although are extremely eager to learn!)so it's useful to be able to translate for them a bit, even if they do laugh at my pronunciation! I found it quite hard going for the first few lessons with them because I didn't realise quite how non-existent their English was and my instructions weren't getting through to them. I taught them very simple greetings for the first lesson which they understood but a lesson or two of blank stares later I realised that they can't read any English, let alone write it. I went on to the topic of family on Wednesday which they managed because I kept it really simple and did lots of drawings and some vocab games to do with family. However, next week I'm planning to really bring it back to absolute basics (literally A B C) in order to teach them to read.

As for my classes at CLC, well, they had a monthly test on Wednesday so I only got to teach them properly (for the third time) on Thursday. As opposed to the Coconut Project English classes, wherein I make up my lesson plans from scratch, the CLC students are taught from text books which teach sentences such as "Mother is hanging the clothes" and "Grandfather is sleeping". Tom and I both find these books a bit limiting and restrictive so we've decided to use them as more of a guideline so we expand upon what the book says to teach. We agreed that this is definitely something to mention to Savoeurn!

Thursday also marked the start of our teacher training lessons. Quite a few teachers showed up - roughly 8 - and we asked them to introduce themselves and say 3 things about themselves. We had a discussion on what they would like to focus on in these lessons and then did a lesson around the topic of family which included some speaking exercises so we could figure out how good (or not so good) their English is. Like the Coconut Project ladies, they're all extremely eager to improve their English but it's clear that there is quite a range of levels in the class so Tom and I have decided to split the class into a higher and a lower group and to teach them seperately as of next week. The higher group will consist of Bo, Lalin and Chakrya who are all members of the youth group in the village and can speak good conversational English already but mainly need help with grammar. The rest are no where near as confident and still need to focus on building their vocabulary as well as grammar. Tom and I have made good friends with Bo and Lalin who have offered to show us the village pagoda on Sunday!

Anyway, we've just been given the task of setting up some spreadsheets for Coconut Project order forms now that we're back in the BAB Kep office again for the weekend so I'd better stop now. I'd also better stop before this blog turns into another novel like Tom's previous post - hehehe kidding!

- Joss

Week 2: Arriving in Kep and Chamcar Bai

Sunday 14/09/08 - Tom Kemeny

We start our second week in Cambodia sitting (or in my case squeezing) on to a bus that will take us from Phnomh Penh to Kep, our placement for the 6 months that we are here. We have been warned by various people that our journey is likely to include garish Cambodian karaoke blasted at top volume for four hours. But thankfully the speakers on our coach appear to be damaged and all we get is a quiet background of Khmer pop. So we are able to observe and appreciate the transition between urban and rural Cambodia in relative quiet. Watching the countryside from the window of the coach was both an enjoyable and a sobbering experience as we saw both stunning landscape and areas that had clearly been over-farmed to the point where they looked more like wastelands.

We reach Kep a few hours later and are deposited by the roadside along with Vy (our volunteer coordinator who makes everything we do in PP and down in Kep soooo much easier), a desktop computer for the office here and our luggage. Instead of carrying everything down the short hill to the BAB office we load our bags one at a time onto the back of a moto driven by Theary (our volunteer coordinator and khmer teacher who also makes everything in Kep doable) and, wearing our helmets of course, we drove down the hill clutching our rather heavy and awkward packages. This was actually the first time either of us had ridden as a passenger on a moto and it certainly made riding them later seem easy and comfortable. When we got to the office we were greated by all the lovely staff here and Lucky, who is an adorable little black and white kitten. Lucky is so named because a Belgian BAB volunteer found her tied up in a sack with her dead siblings very close to death. But after a few months of solid meals and care she has recuperated into a bouncy and hyperactive little cat.

Kep city, where the BAB office is, is more accurately a long straight road with a small cluster of guesthouses, a crabmarket and a lone bar/bakery. It is a beautiful place though, with great views of the sea and surrounding islands. The food down at the crab market is also fantastic as you can buy really fresh seafood (literally out of the ocean and into the pan) for only a few dollars.

After dumping our stuff at the office we rode on the back of Vy and Theary's motos to Chamcar Bai. Chamcar Bai is a tiny village where we will be living and working during the week for the duration of our stay here in Cambodia. The moto journey down there took about 30 minutes but it seemed to pass in a flash since we both spent the ride staring around at the unbelievably scenic views of vibrantly green rice paddies and a backdrop of densely forested hills. When we reached Chamcar Bai we were taken first to the UNESCO site where the Coconut Project and the track to the Red House are. The Coconut Project involves women from ChamCar Bai village hand crafting coconut shells into exquisite jewellery. After visiting the Coconut Project (where we were briefly rained in) we proceeded another kilometer down a dirt track to the Red House where we will be living during the week. The Red House overlooks a large lily pond and to get to the house you have to cross a small man-made waterfall (which doubles as a shower during the week). The house itself is a suprisingly large wooden house on stilts, and of course it is painted a brilliant red. We both fell in love with the house immediately and had it not been neccesary to return to Kep and get our luggage I think we would have slept there that night. The Red House has three rooms - a large bedroom/lounge with two beds and comfortable chairs, a storage room that will later be converted to another bedroom when more volunteers arrive and a kitchen with a gas cooker which works better than the one in PP. We have since upgraded with two lights - one in the kitchen and one on the veranda outside the bedroom - run from a car battery. The only problem we have had in the Red House has been a rat which seems to think everything (nuts, plastic boxes and hoodies) are good to eat! Later in the week we relented and put out poison which immediately solved the problem.

Bright and early on Tuesday we brought our luggage from Kep to Chamcar Bai and finalized our schedules at the Community Learning Centre (CLC) where we will be doing most of our teaching

Now are schedules look something like this:

Tom-

7am: wake up and eat breakfast!

7:30am: cycle to CLC (4km each way)

8am-10am: teaching 4-9 yearolds

10am-11am: teaching teachers

11am-12pm: Khmer lessons with Theary (twice a week)
12:15pm: cycle back to the Red House for lunch and a rest
1:45pm: cycle back to CLC
2pm-4pm: teaching 9-12 yearolds
4pm-5pm: teaching 15 yearolds

5pm: cycle back home
5:30pm: eat dinner
6pm: lesson plan/read and relax
9:30pm: fall into bed

Joss-

7am: wake up and eat breakfast!
7:30am: cycle to CLC (4km each way)
8am-10am: teaching 9-12 yearolds
10am-11am: teaching teachers
11am-12pm: Khmer lessons with Theary (twice a week)
12:15pm: cycle back to the Red House for lunch and a rest
1:45pm: cycle to Coconut Project
2pm-4pm: supervising Coconut Project
4pm-5pm: teaching Coconut Project ladies
5pm: cycle back home
5:30pm: eat dinner
6pm: lesson plan/read and relax
9:30pm: fall into bed

So its pretty full on!! But so far very enjoyable. We have only done two full days of teaching because we return to Kep on Thursday afternoons and help out in the BAB office on Fridays as well as meeting with Savoeurn (the education coordinator) and Theary. The classes have been challenging so far mainly due to the language barrier between ourselves and the students, and also the teachers who are assisting us. Hopefully this will improve as the teachers' English skills improve. It is very enjoyable teaching all my classes as all the kids are so enthusiastic and focused on their learning. The diligence with which they study and their engagement with the work is inspiring. Looking forward to next week!!

Cheers,

Tom

Week 1: Arriving in Kampuchea!

Sunday 7th September

Saturday 30th August, 7am: nine UWCSEA gappies, 1 Mr Morley, 1 JC, 2 Bridges Across Borders staff and at least 180kg of luggage squeeze into a minivan at Phnom Penh airport. A squashed 30 minutes later we all arrived at the Bridges Across Borders office and somehow managed to heave our luggage up 2 or 3 flights of stairs to our rooms. Tom and I will only be staying here temporarily for this first week before going down to Kep but even so, the realisation that our gap year had finally begun was uber exciting and we, like the other 7, found ourselves sitting on the rooftop in a slightly stunned (and sweaty) silence as we let this feeling sink in during our first power cut.

Although it was just over a week ago, it seems like at least a month since the 9 of us and our parents were sitting in Sophie's living room listening to JC, Mr Morley's daughter who did a gap year in Phnom Penh about 3 years ago, giving us some idea of what to expect. Since Monday we've had the opportunity to see all the projects that the 7 PP volunteers will be working at. I reckon everyone here in PP is going to have a fantastic experience and I have to admit it I would be quite keen on working on most of those projects - especially CDCC, the Cambodian Dump Children Centre, which is was quite a large centre which tries to get children off the nearby dump and give them an education, health care and shelter. All the kids loved having us - as did the kids at all the other centres we saw. One girl called Retsaa showed me around and held my arm the whole time we were there. I read some very simple English books with her and some others. Here's a photo of her and me.

We also visited 2 Aziza schools - one in a slum who's residents are in fear of eviction, and the other by the lakeside who face the same problem because the government wants to fill in the lake to have more land for development. The Rudi Boa centre was also by the lakeside. It was particularly shocking to me to walk around the surrounding village. All the houses are built on stilts over the lake. However, the lake is more like a floating rubbish dump as there is no waste colelction system. It's particularly worrying that the kids there swim in the lake which is also full of used needles and other sharp objects. On the Friday we visited Tiny Toones, an orphanage which teaches street kids to break dance and make music as well giving them English and I.T. classes.

I'm glad we got this week to have a chance to see the projects here in PP and to see the way of life. It's been a lot of fun working things out like how to get a tuk-tuk and buying our food at the Russian market, finding out where we are and generally discovering PP. Tomorrow however, Vy (our fantastic PP volunteer coordinator who has been helping us so much to get sorted this week) is taking Tom and me down to Kep by bus. We're really looking forward to getting there as it will mark the real beginning to our gap year.

- Joss