Today was our first day actually working in the community centres. We were up at 6am so we could leave the hotel by 7, to be at the centres by 8 when the first session of classes start. I was on wakeup duty, so my body clock decided to go haywire to make sure I woke up in time to wake all the kids up and so I ended up waking up at 4am and 5am before finally deciding to give up on this sleep caper!
My little group is on their own at our centre, working with littlies: lower primary in the morning and upper primary in the afternoon. They’re very intense, but very loving. Within thirty seconds of sitting on the floor to play some alphabet games on the iPad, we all had limpets stuck to us and clambering in our laps, eager to play.
Lunchtime
It seems that some of the communication channels are a bit strained (which is of course completely understandable when there’s such a large organisation, plus the language differences!) When we arrived, the teacher was under the impression that we had prepared lessons to deliver, and we were under the impression that the teacher would tell us which way they wanted us to help out in his/her classroom. The students looked at me and blinked. So a classic “doorknob lesson” ensued – uhhhh let’s break the kids into small groups and play with the iPad apps we’d downloaded. As I alluded to earlier, this broke the ice pretty thoroughly! We had just reached the “computer lab” for a computer session when the power went out. Whoops!
We ate lunch at the centre, sharing the same meal as the kids, a bowl of rice with a vegie and “surprise” soup – I couldn’t identify a lot of what was in there! The fact we were staying for lunch also caused a bit of consternation and confusion, but we were treated like very honoured guests, having our bowls of rice and soup brought out to us. As soon as we’d finished eating, the kids all came up to play with us, and some of the older girls helped me to learn Khmer pronunciation by reading from my Lonely Planet phrase book – them reading the Khmer, me reading the phonetic spelling. That worked really well, and my new word for today is “sohm”, meaning “please”.
lunchtime
After a very noisy and friendly lunchtime, we retired to the quiet of the upstairs classroom to spend a few minutes preparing some lessons for tomorrow – and on my part, worrying about whether we were supposed to have prepared for this afternoon, which is with a different teacher and group of kids.
The afternoon also contained an awkward bathroom story, but I’m not going to go into great detail: suffice to say that I think the entire centre including office staff and kids knew I needed to go to the loo once I’d asked one person very discreetly where the toilet was!
lunchtime
Our afternoon class was a lot more structured than the morning. Since the kids were a little older, they were learning grammar, vocab and spelling, so I personally felt a lot more comfortable teaching/assisting, even though they were still a lot younger than I’m used to! The teacher, S, who had been teaching for a year, ran with his usual lessons, but asked us to join in with things like helping the kids to learn their vocab. The kids then did a test, and then went to the computer room, where we gave the children some new vocab lists of words which they looked up on google images to define. Apparently tomorrow we will be presenting a “lecture”!!
Next up was a very long bus ride, as the driver got lost multiple times taking us to pick up another group and meet others at another centre for Cambodian dance lessons, mixed with three mystifying phone calls from someone at one of the CCF centres who for some reason thought the timetable for the evening had changed. After the dance class, I can now barely type, after the very unfamiliar hand/finger movements and gestures in the dance we were taught! The girls tried to teach us stretches that they do every day to keep their hand and foot joints flexible enough to bend their hands and toes back in the “more beautiful” sharply flexed poses. Needless to say, not terribly successful on my part, and even though I’ve been dancing in various forms all my life, this one made me feel incredibly ungraceful!
After a slightly less fraught bus ride, we ended up at the Star Restaurant again for dinner, where we had some delicious salads and that chicken curry again. Yum! A challenging day, but one with lots of positives.
Two Weeks Away 