Cambodia update

News from Cambodia—Chris and I have been here now since the beginning of September. We had 2 months of language learning and cultural, work, country learning as well. Then we moved to Kampot, which is near the coast and about 3 hours from the capitol, Phnom Penh. The temperatures here are now a cool 85 degrees F, a nice and welcome change from the 98 degrees that met us in September.
Kampot is really nice and we are in a guesthouse with a super nice family while the woman I am working with and replacing is staying until December and we are taking her house later on. Kampot is an old French colonial town with crumbling buildings and a street system that revolves around circles, so you drive from one circle with a monument in it to the next. Quite nice. Easily bike-able around town and we are enjoying that. We can get a sandwich on French bread and eat it on the side of the river, which is quite beautiful with the mountains in the background. The traffic is not bad at all, and there are a lot of nice places to hang out.
One great place to go is Epic Arts Cafe, which is for deaf and handicapped people and for able-bodied people to meet and hang out. The food is good and I am now learning a bit of Khmer sign language--much more graphic and to the point than American sign language!!! The sign for milk is to make cow horns on your head and then 'milk' your breasts!! It is hard to keep a straight face when ordering coffee with milk. I think Chris orders milk just so he can do the sign....
I am getting better at going to the market and hope that by the time we move into our house, I will be able to negotiate that place. It's big and noisy and has all kinds of animal parts, or even live fish and birds there too. I bought material to have 2 more skirts made. I am wearing traditional Cambodian dress- a long skirt and silk short-sleeved shirt. All the women at work wear these. The ones they sell for foreigners in the capitol are not sewn up the side and always fall open--wrap-around skirts. so I got mine sewn up and now I can ride the bike with the skirt--essential skill here! There are not the foreigner skirts available at Kampot, because not many foreigners there wear the skirts or buy them in the market. So I make a big hit at work. At the market, I wear the sarong like the other women and that is also a big hit. I am trying to do whatever I can to make myself fit in more and to have people talk to me. They seem to appreciate the effort at both the market and at work.
My Khmer is getting better but oh so slowly. I had forgotten how really lonely and frustrating the first 5-6 months in Germany were. It's the same here. I now remember! I do feel I need more formal study and am going to look around for a teacher. Meanwhile, I use Khmer as much as possible with my assistant and with others around me. Slowly slowly it will get better. It's funny how you know you will know some words in about 3 more times of hearing them...still don't own them yet but am on the installment plan!
I am working at a teaching college which is a 2-year program for students who have graduated high school to give them the credentials to be primary school teachers. They have generally never had an education that asked them to think, but rather asked them to produce the 'right answer' that the teacher wanted. I am thinking of light-hearted ways of stimulating some thinking at the college. One is to have a provocative 'quote of the week' for thinking about and hang it outside my door. I think this could be good. I have to go slow because I don't have enough language yet to be able to discuss with the students. I can barely understand what class they have now, let alone have a real discussion with them! So we'll see.... The pedagogy at the school needs a bit of work to be more group-work oriented and to stress having multiple answers. But of course the problem is that the teacher trainers work only 14 hours a week, so it is not a full-time job for them and pays poorly, so they are not so focused on the work. In fact, most elementary school teachers have to have 2-3 other jobs to make ends meet as well. Under these conditions, it is hard to make changes to pedagogy that would require more planning on the teacher’s part. My boss is the deputy director of the school and she is really wonderful—open to ideas, hard-working, fun, and patient with my language and crazy ideas. I look forward to building something great with her.
I will also work with the schools where the students practice teach and so that should be fun to do. I have an 8-day meeting from the ministry of education next week on 'child friendly schools' and I will be bored out of my brain. I will bring the Khmer alphabet to learn. The learning is slow because it is new concepts and they have to repeat a lot of things to make sure people understand. I think I come in at the follow-up stage because that's where the support is needed--putting what they learned into practice. I have seen some really great teaching at the elementary level and am excited to work with teachers who themselves are quite excited about the new concepts. The idea is to improve the schools that the student teachers are in so that they see some 'child-centered' pedagogy and use group work. I do think there is some space for working with them and building good relationships with them.
We are in Phnom Penh for a meeting with the Education Sector of VSO and for the Water Festival--the city is absolutely crazy with people. It is a very bustling city anyway, but this is really nuts. We actually had a boat in the water festival--we came in 5th in a race of 2 boats. How is this possible? We were passed by 2 races behind us as well!!! The Cambodians are amazing with paddling--the boats range in size from 23 people to 55 (ours) to over 70 and you can either sit or stand to paddle--we sat, I think otherwise, we'd have a lot of people overboard. The Cambodian trainers for rowing were beside themselves with us--we never did get a very good together rhythm going, most people rowed by themselves--a metaphor for the work we do here, unfortunately. But despite ridiculous practice runs, it was fun on the day to see all the boats and the races. Really colorful, skilled, fast, beautiful boats.
Thanksgiving was spent at a Khmer-VSO party; I learned some traditional Cambodian dances and it was great fun. Last year I was at an education conference and to a Celeidgh dance in Scotland. Somehow it seems that Thanksgiving time is a great time for world-wide celebrations of one sort or another!
Chris has been having a nightmare of various computer problems. We are afraid that we fried the old computer and now he has to set up the new one and it is misbehaving and he doesn't know how to solve a lot of the technical issues involved in getting the programs he needs onto the new system. The old one fried in a dead outlet at a restaurant in Kampot, 5 minutes before he sent the job off. That cost a week of time and now he has been in Phnom Penh for 10- days. We leave tomorrow for Kampot and I have monday off work, so maybe we can bicycle around and enjoy the area a bit. Chris is a huge grumpus at the moment, with good reason, he's been busy with these problems for the better part of a month now. it's quite frustrating.
Besides the computer problems, and the language issues, and the culture shock, we are doing quite well. So I guess we are at the right stage for the length of time we've been here--feeling more comfortable but still unsettled, no schedule or friends much yet, and able to say basic sentences but get lost in conversations. a bit daunting but normal, I suspect!
Our address is: Charlene and Chris, VSO Programme Office, PO Box 912, Phnom Penh, Cambodia if anyone wants to write!!
Wishing you all a great thanksgiving weekend, and thinking of you lots.
Charlene and Chris

Beginning Adventures

We arrived in Phnom Penh on September 6 or so. It has been so long and time does strange things here. We are not tourists, but we live like tourists and we are not locals but we are trying to learn the language and culture in order to function locally. So we have an in-between identity now of mostly living as a group of 18 volunteers and attending language lessons four hours a day. We have a cook who makes amazing food for us (Khmer food) and we have 2 'barang' (foreigner) restraunts that many of us frequent along the riverside. We go to the market, find material, have clothes made for our work, bike around the town, and do some touristy things as well. It's a strange mixture of waiting and doing, of dipping a toe into the local culture and being sheltered in an old French colonial mansion, with people to get us breakfast and meals, and only having to study. The panic of knowing that I can barely say 'hello' and a few nicities, which will open the door to more necessary learning, and the yearning to leave the comforts of the familiar and start to look around my workplace. (saying that I will 'start' work would be way too ambitious--the plan for the first 3-6 months is to look, ask questions, be supportive, build relationships, and DO very little in the way of what we would think of as a way of starting a job)

We are staying in Kampong Cham, about 3.5 hours by bus from the capitol, Phnom Penh. It is an old colonial town that sits on the Mekong River and was a transport center before. For tourists, it is mostly a 'pass through' town on the way to someplace else. There are about 40,000 people who live here, but it seems smaller than that. It supports 2 large markets and many smaller, morning markets that have vegtables and fruit for sale along with freshly killed (or in the case of fish, still alive!) meat. There is a very ancient Buddist temple, or Wat, at the far end of town that is said to be older than the famous Ankor Wat. In the middle of that is a functioning temple that people worship at still.

We took a boat down the Mekong to see a silk weaving village and a wooden Wat. The Wat survived Pol Pot times because it was so modest and wooden. It was used then as a 'health center' where 2,000 people died due to lack of medical supplies, malnutrition, and starvation. History is so layered, as it is everywhere, but here it comes into stark relief in hearing these stories. Even buying a coconut to drink can elicit stories of how there was no food in Pol Pot times and how they were skinny, and something about their skin (my Khmer is not good enough yet to understand most of what people say to me). Just that normal, everyday things can be turned on their head with a sentence. The silk weaving village was incredible--women working looms to weave colorful silk cloth. They do the entire process of washing, spinning, dying, and weaving the cloth. The only thing they don't do that they used to do is grow the silk. During Pol Pot times, the trees were all cut down that fed the catepillars. They import the raw silk from elsewhere now. Many villages are trying to go back to traditional crafts but face big hurdles because of resources and changes that were made in the 1970's. In addition, more than 50% of the population is under age 15, so much of the old knowledge is dying or has died. And the younger generation, as everywhere, is changing and wants city life, less work, different things.

This is the first installment of impressions so far. It's a test and if it goes well, more will be posted shortly.