It’s almost been two weeks since I last posted – time has flown! The teaching has been going well, though last week was tough since we focused on grammar at our first school (the one where we do all the planning and teaching). NOT the most exciting topic I the world. Is there a more entertaining way to teach singular/plural, past tense, negatives, questioning, etc? Well we do try to at least finish with some games.
At least the rain has diminished a great deal so we’re no longer standing in water to teach. It does mean the mosquitoes have gotten a bit worse, though still not nearly as bad as I’d feared. There is still enough water in the river for the kids to do a bit of fishing during break time, but the fish they catch are about 2 inches max. Our students at the first school are really a range of English. Some grasp it all very quickly while others just look blankly at their paper.
At the second school, I have a co-teacher, Chantha (he goes by his nickname Toy.) So we usually follow his lesson plan and I do the readings and practice the grammar and pronunciation with the kids, who are overall more advanced than our first school. It was a bit awkward last Friday when Toy handed around a sheet with a story he’d written in English about the upcoming water festival. He asked me to read it out loud, which I did, but it was rather filled with errors, incorrect grammar, and run on or awkward sentence structure. I started to make edits on my copy to give him later, but he wanted to try to have the students make corrections real time. He was a great sport and said he was really glad I was there to correct the mistakes, but there were so many I offered to go home and retype the sheet, which I just finished. Even a relatively good English speaker has difficulty, which is why they so appreciate native speakers here.
Outside of school, Jen and I have done more exploring. Sometimes it’s just running errands, getting groceries or school supplies. We just hop on our bikes and navigate through the cows, blaring horns of warning and crazy wrong way moto-drivers wherever we need to go. I am so glad to be biking instead of taking tuk-tuks like the tourists. Much better exercise and much more local interaction. Though more often than not, someone local will start biking alongside either Jen or me and start a conversation to practice their English. Everyone is really friendly, but usually biking these streets is when I need to concentrate so trying to carry on a conversation and avoid running over small children or being taken out by a larger vehicle is not ideal!
Knock on wood, we’ve managed to avoid any serious mishaps, stomach bugs or . Well, I did manage to trip down some stairs and scrape up my knee like a six year old. But more entertaining was my ant battle. Overall, our hotel is really nice and quite clean. But there have been times of little ant swarms. They are teeny, but seem to come in numbers. From my college days and living in Somerville with occasional ant problems, these are not my favorites! So I keep all food in the fridge or thrown out in a trash can in the hallway. Even so, I’ve seen them from time to time and I have taken to using my 30% Deet Ben’s bug spray on them, One day, was finding quite a few of them in the bathroom after school. These were high up and I was afraid they were coming in packs out of the ceiling railing. At one point I put down the bug spray, saw some more and grabbed it again…only to have picked it up backward and my aggressive attack squirt went right into one eye! OWWWW!
Fortunately, I was fine by the next morning, but I left the sticky spray littered with a few ant corpses up at the top of the wall. Figured that would serve as a warning to any other little buggers who try to make their way in! HA! (And again knock on wood, but I haven’t seen any for a few days so maybe my strategy has worked!)
Jen and I have been trying to explore more in and around town. We’ve actually lived it up a couple of weekend days by hitting the pool at the Meridian hotel. Considering we’re talking about 100 degree heat and dripping humidity, a pool is just heavenly. In general, our hotel is far nicer than either of us might have expected. Reliable, though a bit slow, wireless, cable tv, A/C, delivery food options… It’s weird to have all these amenities, though! At least we see the other side with our teaching and our students and I’m certainly not going to complain about air conditioning in this heat We’ve also found a regular bar to hang out and we’ve met some westerners who are more or less local having lived here for a while. Some of them still don’t speak much Khmer though.
We had a third volunteer for a very short period. Karly was supposed to be here for two weeks but on her first day of teaching, she got word that her parents had been in a bad car accident. We’d first heard that one of them had died, but it turned out it was a taxi driver, not her parents. Still, they were in pretty bad shape and she headed home to be with them.
So Jen and I are on our own again. Thank goodness Jen is here! I would be having a very different time without a buddy to experience it all with. Yesterday we saw the artisan center, silk farm and floating villages on the lake. A very cool day!
And we are going to Laos on Saturday to check out another country while we’re here.
That means we’ll bump up our visit to the orphanage to Friday – hopefully we can find some Halloween masks to do with the kids. Our visits to the orphanage have been amazing. We play baseball, do sticker books or just play around with them. The orphanage is small and the kids seem very well cared for. They do hate to see us go though! It will be sad saying goodbye in less than two weeks!
Well, that’s probably more of an update than anyone would have wanted and it’s getting late here so off to bed! Can’t believe I’ll be home in less than a month now…
Miss everyone! Thanks for writing when you can! I love hearing from people.
Val
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