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!

Week 5: Pchum Ben disruptions

As Tom mentioned in his last blog, this week we had Monday and Tuesday off because of Pchum Ben celebrations. So on Saturday morning we set off for Sihanoukville, a holiday town with beautiful beaches in SW Cambodia. We had a bit of difficulty getting there as our tuk-tuk broke down half way to Kampot (40 mins away) and we had to wait for over an hour in Kampot for someone to show up wanting to share a taxi with us to Sihanoukville ($5 each for a shared taxi as opposed to $25 each for a private taxi). Anyway, 4 hours after leaving Kep we arrived at the guesthouse where 6 of the PP volunteers who were standing outside (Seb was back in Singapore watching the F1). It was strangely surreal to see them again as it felt sort of like a family reunion which made us all laugh. We had a really great time seeing them all again, swapping stories of how our teaching is going, how it is to live in PP/Chamcar Bai as well as practising a bit of our Khmer with each other! It seems that everything is going well for them in PP and that they're all enjoying working at their placements. They were all really interested to see what we've been up to and what CB is like. In actual fact they've even already planned to come down and see it for themselves next weekend! Yay!! Now how to break it to Paa...

On the Sunday night we all went to a sports bar to watch the Singapore F1 night race which was awesome. Not only was it an exciting race but we also had fun pointing out "Hey! That's the Padang! The Esplanade! The Fullerton! The Singapore Flyer!". Quite bizarre. After a weekend of relaxing on the beach, jumping waves, entertaining beach vendors (including numerous episodes of Jamie very successfully ripping himself off even without their help) and enjoying the cheap food and drink, the others went back to PP and Tom and I returned back to Kep on Monday - involving another hour of hastly haggling taxi drivers.

We returned to Kep on Wednesday morning for literally less than 48 hours before coming back on Thursday evening again to work in the office on Friday so we in the end we didn't really do much teaching again this week. Even less so because this week all the public schools re-opened for the new term so on Wednesday CLC was closed and on Thursday only 4 students turned up to my 'middle' class. I taught the little kids with Tom instead although to be honest I prefer to teach the slightly older kids in my middle class because the little kids write so slowly that half of the 2 hour long lesson has to be spent by them copying a few new words from the board into their books before the lesson can really get started. It is all veeeeryyyy sloooooowwww.

We also only managed to get one teacher training session in this week so I started teaching the less advanced class how to give directions. They understood the vocab well enough but I think the concept of bird's-eye-view maps confused them even though I drew one as simply as possible. Change of tactics next lesson! Fortunately I still got to help out at the Coconut Project and teach them on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. I'm getting to know the girls who work there much better now and they can sometimes even understand what I'm saying in Khmer! Khmer classes are really awesome. This week we even started to learn how to pronounce and write some Khmer letters! Not easy I tell you. Not easy at all. Anyway, teaching the CP ladies to read is going reasonably well so far although I'm still teaching them really simple stuff like the sounds 'sh', 'th' and 'ch'. It's a bit boring for them so I think I'm going to start doing 2 vocab-orientated lessons and 2 reading/writing lessons per week to mix it up a bit more.

Back at the Red House the two cats who we named Darthvader and Unlucky have reappeared but we've decided to rename Darthvader as Ifya (I Fed You Already). We also had a small snake downstairs. We're going back to the Red House tomorrow morning and are meeting a new friend, Sarin in the afternoon because he invited us over to his house. Today we decided to go for a walk up a hill in Kep National Park which was a good idea although next time I think I'll bring a long stick to waft around infront of me while I'm walking to get rid of all the spiderwebs. I think we missed a turning or something because the walk was a bit longer than we expected but we got a great view of the sunset over the ocean and stopped for dinner at the Led Zep cafe on the way back. Weekends are going to be pretty full-on for the next 3 weeks because it's not only the 7 PP volunteers who are coming down next weekend - Tom's parents are coming to visit us the weekend after that and my parents and 2 brothers will do the same the following weekend! It's nice to know we're so popular - I just hope we'll still have enough energy to teach!