We got a taste of what our week in Cambodia holds for us today. I had an appointment to go to a school to see if I could help with the English teaching first thing this morning. We managed to call the facilitator and arranged to meet him at the entrance to a Wat (temple) near the school. We got a tuk tuk and took off through the crazy streets of Phnom Penh, packed with scooters, cars and thousands and thousands of commuters, all with almost no traffic lights or rules, just sharing the streets a la school of fish style, everyone just weaving in and out and managing to not hit each other. Pretty amazing. As we pulled up to the Wat, a young man on a scooter asked if I was Julie and we were off. Turns out the school is in a very poor slum, an area where a company has decided to fill in a huge lake in order to expand the footprint of Phnom Penh. The people who used to live off of the lake are now displaced and can no longer fish as there is no lake, just a vast dry lake bed. So, Lakeside School is now dry lake bed school. There were two very young teachers having about 15 first to fourth graders write down a strange English story, learning English by rote. It was chaos and no real learning was going on. Tomorrow the teacher is going to let me plan the lesson and lead two classes. I'm not sure why I agreed to try, but there it is.
We next went to the Sihanouk Hospital Center of Hope, where Dan volunteered for two weeks last year. He was very warmly welcomed, many doctors and staff members remembered him and were happy to see him. We got a tour of the facility, which has improved considerably just in the past year. They have a new building and much world class medical equipment, thanks to donors from all over the world. As we were introduced around, I met with Grace, an American woman who is the human resources director, or some such. She is also trying to cover a full load of ESL classes while the ESL teacher is away for month getting an ESL certificate. She asked if I would like to teach a class that was going to be meeting in an hour and a half. I said "sure" and it was off to the races. It was a great group of eight hospital works, none of whose names I will ever be able to pronounce. The Khmer language is very unusual!
After someone managed to get the air con working the sweat stopped dripping down my back as I led the class, and it was really a fun time. Afterwards, I was waiting for Dan to finish going on medical rounds, hanging out in the volunteer lounge, when Grace came in and recruited me to teach about 10 more classes this week. Guess I won't be watching too much HBO in the hotel.
We'll get some better pictures soon.
J & D
Wowzers...teaching on the fly! You are quite brave. You'll have to tell me how it went: were they way off before? Is there a cultural element in the way they present instruction? I met a gal recently who had taught forever but in Mexico City. She was teaching young kids and was so totally yelling at them. But she was teaching in the U.S., where that is not done. It was SO interesting to observe.
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