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!