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.

Review: The Killing Fields (1984)

"Here, only the silent survive."

After reading Haing Ngor's autobiography, I was ready to watch the 1984 film which made him a star and gave him a way to spread awareness for Cambodia.

The movie is not as dark as Survival in the Killing Fields. Ngor himself said that Dith Pran hadn't suffered the way he had, had escaped the pain of seeing his immediate family taken away from him or killed. Dith Pran's family did leave him, but it was in a helicopter to the safety of America. However, Ngor meant it when he said they were brothers at heart. Ngor was able to translate his suffering into Dith Pran's suffering in the movie, and later in life they shared the common goal of raising awareness of Cambodia.

But what the movie lacks in blackness is made up for in the menace of seeing the Khmer Rouge come to life on screen. Ngor's description of the forced march out from Phnom Penh and the terror of the violent, extreme ignorance of the Khmer Rouge reinforce the scenes in the movie. With the added knowledge from his words, I watched the procession and the hospital evacuation scenes with a heavy heart. I saw parts of the rest of the movie unwillingly; the tension and flow of the movie is just that good. Unfortunately, whenever I became convinced that something bad surely would happen, my feelings came true.

I was heartbroken by the end of the movie. I felt psychologically sapped. The fact that the movie has a happy ending did not make up for the hurts along the way, especially in the penultimate scene. It's a curious movie, put together with two dissonant stories--Sydney's in New York dealing with survivor's guilt, Pran's in the rural countryside doing backbreaking labor under the threat of death--but it works.

As for the psychological picture of the Khmer Rouge and their ideology, Ngor's comments in his autobiography resonated with me as I watched the movie. The chhlop, the little girl he describes as shy and sweet when not filming and utterly transformed in the movie, did indeed look chilling, almost soulless as she supervised the workers and picked out which ones to punish. People say that children are innocent, and she was, but innocent in its most evil form, like a being with no conscience. In fact, the movie's focus on children was not just a decision meant to tug at the heartstrings of American audiences, but a choice that showed all parts of their involvement, including the backwards Khmer Rouge boys who had never seen things the city people took for granted. A lot of the soldiers were very young, something that Ngor talks about, but seeing it on screen reinforced the truth. Every time a soldier walked by who appeared to be about ten or twelve, it was frightening.

There's a scene in the middle of the movie when Dith Pran is shirking work. He's looking at a group of children being 'educated.' There's a stick finger drawing of a family unit on a blackboard: mother, father, two children, all holding hands. The Khmer Rouge official calls on a little boy to come up to the blackboard. He crosses out the family and erases the parts of the fingers which are touching so that the children no longer hold hands with the parents. To me, this scene encapsulates everything about the Khmer Rouge. It's funny how two little gestures, often seen in elementary schools, making x's on what is bad or what doesn't belong and erasing a small portion of something on a blackboard or whiteboard with a finger, can portray such brutality. That's the power of film at work.

I would recommend this film to anyone who wants to see a very authentic portrait of what Cambodia must have been like in the late '70s that comes along with a story of a great friendship. The violence and tension are reminiscent of other '80s movies; it is rated R for a reason, and it depicts people of all ages in hospitals or as trauma victims, but it's not unbearable. The acting is superb. The shots of the countryside are beautiful, even in the midst of war. It's very clear about America's failures regarding Cambodia, which may not be to everyone's tastes, but I don't think it's advancing an anti-American sentiment, just as acknowledgement that we (as yes, we are capable of) made the wrong decision about how to advance the stability of the region.

It's available on Amazon Instant Video, and a 30th anniversary edition has been released in Blu-ray.

Review: Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor

A Wonderful Account of a Terrible Era

I don't want to spoil this wonderful book by Haing Ngor, who played the part of Dith Pran in the Killing Fields and won an Academy Award for his acting. But it has several points that make it a must-read for anyone who is interested in Cambodia, or even anyone who is interested in international affairs in general.

• It's written by someone who was a grown man at the time of the Khmer Rouge takeover. A lot of survivor's stories are written by people who were then children who did not understand the implications of what was going on. Children may have also suffered less personally, although, given that the genocide affected every family, most survivors did have their family brutally ripped from them.
• Haing Ngor, being a person of intelligence and consequence, has an engaging viewpoint and a wonderful tone. I would read a fictional account in his narrative voice, because he is a completely believable character. Even though terrible events swirl around him, he still has human faults. The writer he worked with has a foreword at the end of the book in which he describes working with Ngor. Their artistic vision and narration blend seamlessly.
• Haing Ngor continued to be a person of consequence for Cambodia, in ways both good and bad, after the Khmer Rouge years. Therefore his later life is as interesting as the earlier portions.
• The connections that Ngor has to his family, and the events which transpire around them, are comical, frustrating, tragic, and inspiring. It's pretty clear that the autobiography was not exaggerated for dramatic effect--it didn't need to be. I was engaged by Ngor's familial relationships and haunted by what he was haunted by, even if I didn't always agree with his actions or opinions.
• Ngor's descriptions of the suffering he endured were tasteful and honest. I did not feel that they were written because of catharsis, which is the case for many survivor stories. They also did not intend to shock the audience--in fact, Ngor always warns before the scenes in which he describes very unpleasant things. I don't know why someone would read a book about a survivor's experience and skip over these scenes, but I appreciated his warnings so that I could steel myself for what I knew would happen next.
• At the end of the book, Ngor describes his experiences filming the Killing Fields. This gives him and his audience a triumphal experience to relish after his suffering in Cambodia, and lends another aspect to the book. However, Ngor does a fantastic job of letting his readers know how his life experiences informed his acting. Thus it doesn't feel like a chintzy interlude, but a logical consequence of his earlier suffering.

All in all, it's the best survivor account I've ever read. It holds together as a literary work, and it involves a deeply flawed but very sympathetic hero. Go read it.

Current Financials 8/8

Here's a quick financial update:

Flights and hotels are all set! Visa has also been paid. It was more than anticipated but not by much.

Estimated Expenses

1) Ground transportation from Phnom Penh to Battambang, round trip=$110
2) Transport to and from school=$70
3) Estimated baggage fees* (It would cost over $200 to check a second bag on united for a round trip, and even more than that for the Korean-Phnom Penh part. I do not at this time plan to check a second bag (God help us all...)

If I did check one extra bag just going to Cambodia to deal with school supplies, it would cost $100 + $20/kg. Assuming I could keep it light (under 20 pounds), the total cost would be $280.

4) School Supplies=$250
5) Food/living expenses=$300

Total=$730
Total with light 2nd checked bag one way=$1010

As of right now, I have the following campaign funds:

Me: $540.49
GoFundMe: $201.42

Total: $741.91

I plan to use the scholarship money I receive to mop up any extra costs and pay for the hotel I am staying in in Korea, but I'm very thrilled at how much help I've received! My next steps: obtain some Khmer learning resources, start the visa application process, and start planning my syllabus!

Update with Volunteer Dates!

I've started a new donation campaign on gofundme for people who didn't donate last time, and I've officially booked my flight!I'll be in Asia or travelling there and back from 9/18-10/8 of this year. Because I cut down the duration of my stay, I'm doing quite well budget-wise, but there's always extra, unforeseen expenses, and I'll have to travel on land from Phnom Penh to Battambang and back, so I am anticipating some budget items to cost more, some to cost less, and others to rear their ugly heads at the least ideal moment!

I've been selected to receive the Spirit of Goddard Scholarship because of my promotion of the college's mission statement. Although it will be awarded to me after I return from my trip, I plan to use the money to help defray the cost of the unforeseen or over-expensive budget items that I'm sure will arise. I'm very relieved to have this safety net and have sent out a grateful letter of appreciation to the donors.

I'm so happy that my dream of volunteering is coming true.