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 .jpg)
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!
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 .jpg)
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!
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