Cambodia - Day Two

The Courtyard of Bospo Primary School

I write this post with a heavy heart, because I've learned that the organization where I'm teaching, KNGO Cambodia, which helps almost 450 children with English, computer skills, and vocational lessons, will close unless they receive funding.

Yesterday was my first 'true' day of teaching. After observing the children on Day One and realizing how much they are capable of that even their regular teacher does not realize, I was eager to begin implementing my own lessons. Children in this country learn by recitation, by memorization, and formula. There's nothing wrong with that, especially when learning a foreign language, but it doesn't engage one's creativity. The first two sections of my classes, the Level 1 learners, read their first book in English yesterday. I read it to them; we read it together out loud as I traced the words; we talked about vocabulary, with me miming meaning to them--it was exhilarating when they understood and shouted out the definition in Khmer--and we read together in translation.

The children were incredibly excited to even see a book, let alone think about reading one in English. They loved the pictures and the repetition, along with the building of meaning, allowed them to grasp the whole of the book and the individual sentences with which they had trouble. Today we will be working on making our own books. But my mind is racing with dread. I have pledged to help however I can, including advising KNGO to set up a crowdfunding campaign, and using my language skills to proofread, search for, and write grant proposals. But I'm not a grantwriter and I know that these things are difficult even for native speakers. No one has any training.

The leader of the organization, Mr Sun Saveth, who has been an excellent host to me, also sent out an email to all current and former volunteers, citing what he needed to continue running KNGO. Another suggestion that will hopefully reach many. I'm not sure how many children that I have been teaching will be turned away as the school makes sad and necessary cuts to its funding. I can't describe to you where children in this wonderful country can end up when the situation is dire for them; you've seen where children in our very safe first-world countries can end up...

I'm thinking about what I can do, and there are no clear answers. I'm only one person and I don't matter so much. But the school will be closing shortly if I can't help by coming up with some answers, so it's time for me to make some decisions.

Please, if you can help, here is the link to the campaign. It's not for me; it's for them. I will be fine no matter what...but they will not.

Cambodia – Day One

Almost twenty hours of flights, one twenty-four hour layover in Seoul, and a five-hour car ride later, I am here. My bed is a paradise, having gained the luxury of being weighed down by the time spent traversing the globe. My body feels rattled; a yoga episode in Phnom Penh only proved how broken down it was, and then I had a ride to Battambang that resembled nothing like a car ride.

People have been bombarding me with questions and good wishes, but I have wanted only sleep. The hours stretch out and then compress, and the Internet here is spotty—is that such a surprise in a country where you can buy a SIM card for $1? As I travel, I think about how unstoppable these people will be once they get good communications infrastructure, how a nation of people who all seem to know each other and who drive the way that birds migrate—noisily, in flocks, as they like, but always heading to the same places—will fare when they fully understand email.

A view of some houses as we go by

The school is in Bospo Village. A village isn’t what you or I think it is. It’s a winding labyrinth of dirt roads, one after another, too narrow to bring a car through for the most part. KNGO itself is an impressive structure, three white-stone rooms that sit side-by-side (this is not a country for hallways) and two outdoor classrooms that are ‘open air’…little more than a collection of benches and yard sale-esque tables, with no protection from the environment.

KNGO has an agreement with Bospo Village public school, a courtyard of rooms with hut-like roofs where children recite noisily what they have learned, each class out-shouting the others. I’m teaching with a kind teacher. Her first two classes are students that appear between the ages of eight and eleven; her second class between maybe eleven and thirteen, some of them already getting tall. Level 1 and Level 2, they are called. The students greet the teacher; they sit on benches made of rough wood that marginally resemble desks, and they take out their tiny little Asian notebooks and write. Today, I only observed. I think that is fair. Observed, helped, tried to persevere over the school’s standing-only toilet (failed miserably!), and plotted how to adapt my lessons to these children.

Sorry about the random water bottle!

Their English, while sounding suspiciously like Cambodian phonemes, is shockingly good. These children don’t have running toilets at their school, you see. Their cafeteria is an old lady with a bowl full of delicious Cambodian fruits and a hot-dog type stand. Most of them live nearby in houses smaller than your living rooms, with no windows or doors, only curtains for privacy. Maybe a back room that is more concealed from the elements and the neighbors. That’s not what pity is, though. That’s admiration.

I feel for them because they use these silly Oxford workbooks that have little to no comprehension of their world. They’re meant for Western children, or maybe for Koreans—they tell tales such as “Mrs. Smith can’t type” and “Mr. Roberts is an engineer”. Yet, most of these children can’t type. They don’t have multimedia classrooms. Their hands-on learning is basically having a foreigner come to recite the words to them, and show them how to form the ‘t’ on the ends of things, or the letter ‘z’. But somehow, they are learning English and some of them will go on to depend on it—in most cases, it could determine their lives.

Classes are small enough for a lot of individual attention, and the emphasis on notebook copying means that everyone has to produce writing, which alleviates a lot of the problems with, for instance, Korean public schools where the class sizes are too large for individual feedback or checks.

All in all, I’m happy to be here. I’m having a good time in between being very tired, and I’m looking forward to getting to teach today!

I leave Thursday!

People are surprised when I tell them that the flight from Korea to Phnom Penh is over five hours, and that, when heading east towards Korea, it's run as a red-eye. I don't think that people are uneducated when it comes to the size and scale of various world regions, but it's very possible to forget that there's so much distance between countries, and that hopping to 'Asia' and getting around would be like assuming that San Francisco is next to Baltimore...

I feel ready. I'm not finished; I have a million little tasks to complete and real-life obligations to fulfill before I leave, but I feel prepared to take in the long journey and come out on the other side. I'll be posting regular updates, and probably micro-updates on Twitter as well, so feel free to follow me @mspicone.