five months in cambodia

wow. how does five months go so fast? seems like yesterday that i was learning how to take a shower by dumping a plastic saucepan of water over my head; wash my clothes in a large metal bowl; and unloose my bowels without the comforts of a seat, toilet paper or flusher.

and now here i am, in cambodia, doing all of these things with ease. especially the washing clothes bit, which gets done in a machine by someone else. this someone else - a khmer girl who works at the french orphanage where i live - even neatly fold my clothes and returns them in a hamper. way easier than my life even in the so-called prosperous us of a! my life post-living with the parents, anyway.

at the orphanage, i live in a house reserved for french visitors. these visitors are either members of the NGO that runs the joint, or they individually sponsor one of the kids who lives at the orphanage or in one of the surrounding villages. or sometimes these visitors stay at the orphanage while providing free services for the kids, like dentistry and acupuncture.

so, back to the accommodations at my house. er, i mean, the guesthouse. or maybe penthouse. penthouse, because in addition to the laundress, there's a toilet seat in one of the four bathrooms. in cambodia, a toilet seat is a giant stride along the path to the lap of luxury. other strides: electricity (i got it!), western stove (got it!) (cold) running water (got it! .) and ... that's all the attainable luxuries i can think of.

o, maybe a fridge. (don't got it, although came close to getting it.) the french dude who helps run the orphanage told me a french NGO lady requested a fridge for her week's visit to cambodia. said french dude then asked me if i would use the fridge enough to justify the expense. an honest kind of gal - and a lazy, non-cooking kinda gal - i said no. so no fridge for me. i don't miss it.

i don't miss much here in my cambodian penthouse - except my lovely friends and relatives, of course! after much confusion, i have adapted to the workings - or, more often, non-workings -of life in cambodia. my slow-movingness (what an ugly non-word!) fits nicely into cambodia's culture of waiting and waiting and more waiting for things to happen.

take my high school, for example. classes started maybe a month behind schedule. that's how long it took the school director to create a teaching schedule. and that schedule still changed several more times, resulting in multiple classes scheduled for the same classroom and many teachers simply failing to show up. there are no substitute teachers in cambodia and no system for telling the students when there's no class, so when their teacher doesn't show up, the students usually just spend the typical two hours of a cambodian class sitting and waiting.

after a month of sitting and waiting with the students and observing the occasional six or so english teachers at my school, i went the easy way out and selected one teacher as my co-teacher. this fine gentleman was the same teacher originally assigned to me. maybe next year i'll let one of the other teachers experience the joy of teaching with me.

o, that's what i'm doing in cambodia, by the way. teaching english at a high school. as a volunteer with the peace corps, which is a branch of the u.s. government, but not related to the war corps. at least not yet anyway.

i teach grades 10, 11 and 12. i teach 16 hours a week, which leaves me with oodles of free time. (please don't disclose this secret to the hordes of cambodians demanding i teach english to them and everyone they know.)

i surrendered to some of these demanding hordes, and now teach english to three groups:

1. "all" of the teachers at the high school and the staffers at the orphanage (this "all" quickly dwindled to a measly three students: all staffers at the orphanage.)

2. the high-school-age kids who live at the orphanage.

3. the under-high-school-age kids who live at the orphanage. (this teaching is in the form of english songs.)

so plenty of english teaching. i like the game-playing part of english teaching, but not the grammar teaching part. probably cause i don't know any of english's tight-ass grammar rules. i don't know WHY english is the way it is, it just is, ok? fortunately, my high school co-teacher is a grammar stud. so he teaches the students the whos and whoms while i teach how to "put your right leg in and your right leg out, do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about."

when i'm not teaching english, i'm probably sleeping, eating or being harassed by bands of youngsters demanding i draw, race or play catch with them. (i initiated all of these activities, but that doesn't mean i want to engage in these activities ever again.)

or i'm learning khmer, the language of cambodia. i have a teacher who visits my house six hours a week to educate me in the subtleties of the language. these subtleties are currently restricted to mere speaking and listening, since i'm not ready to go anywhere near the crazy loop-de-loop of the khmer script. maybe next year, when i teach with more than one teacher, learn french and wash my own clothes.

NOTE: The contents of this Web site are mine and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps. This blog is not an official publication of the Peace Corps or of the United States government.