Never in my life have I seen so much rubbish as on the Saturday of our visit in .jpg)
ildren Centre – where a few of the PP volunteers work) children, Tom and I and the PP volunteers visited the .jpg)
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 CD.jpg)
CC 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 .jpg)
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.jpg)
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 .jpg)
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
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 supe.jpg)
rvising 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 .jpg)
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 cy.jpg)
cle 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 .jpg)
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
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