Tuesday, November 23, 2010

From My TV

Many of you in America, it seems, have heard about what happened in Phnom Penh.

I was not in Phnom Penh this weekend for the Water Festival. Instead I watched the boat races, floating barges, and fireworks on TV with my family. Last night, I went to bed around 9 after watching the packed concert live from the capital city. Then today, we sat and watched on TV the aftermath of last night's stampede. All-day news coverage showed interviews with survivors and families of the deceased, government representatives visiting the bridge, and the hospitals. Everything at the hospitals. Cambodian television news, I learned today, is a fair bit more graphic than what we see in the states. They showed the many wounded lying packed into hospital hallways, placed close together on mats. They showed an interview with a survivor in the hospital ward who, between grimaces of pain, talked about what had happened to him. And they showed the dead, the bodies laid out in rows with narrow aisles between. At one location, they were outside, under an awning to protect from the midday heat as much as possible in Cambodia, and each was covered with a sheet. Another location where they have the bodies seemed to be inside, and the cameras panned over the faces in the rows, mostly young people still decked out in their party clothes. The camera crews rolled on as the families came through to identify and collect the bodies. In the background, I saw crowds of curious onlookers pressed against a fence, watching the bodies as they were wrapped and placed in caskets, then pushed three across onto waiting green trucks.

We watched through the afternoon and through dinner, too. The dishes from lunch went unwashed in the sink, an unprecedented event in my time here. I could understand little of what was said on the news all day. My host mother occasionally tried to explain in more basic words so I could get an idea. -This girl they are interviewing, her father and mother are both dead.- -They say the Prime Minister is going to give 5 million riel ($1200) to each family, money they can use to pay for the funerals.- As we saw the grieving families, she explained how they are identifying the bodies. She said that most of the people had cell phones with them. When family members call, the police, who have collected the phones, answer and inform the caller that the phone owner has died. Over and over, she just repeated ‘Ahnut nah,’ meaning roughly ‘Such a shame, such a shame.’

I couldn’t understand her explanation or the news stories about what had actually happened at the stampede. I’ve been able to read the English-language news online, but it’s clear that there are competing versions of the story being tossed around, particularly regarding the role of the police in what happened last night. To state a fact, on this year’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Transparency International scored Cambodia, tied with several other countries, 154th out of 178 countries. The countries ranking lower were Somalia, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Chad, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Venezuela, Kyrgystan, Guinea, and the Congo. While I’m not sure what the truth behind the stampede is, I can tell you that what was shown on the state-sponsored television station seemed to be different from what was shown on the other channels, and the initial government reports seemed to be different than what has been reported by most of the large news agencies. Yet another reminder that things are, well, different here.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

The 'Aha' Moment

I was sitting in my school’s office during a break between classes this week, like you do when it rains and the teacher tables are wet. As usual, the chatting between the teachers was in language well beyond my comprehension, so I was zoning. As I looked around the office, I noticed a board on which a chart had been meticulously drawn (using a ruler, it must have been, as is a favorite pastime in Cambodia). I started reading the only part of the chart I could understand – the numbers. I could also make out the words ‘students’ and ‘girls’ at the top of the columns. The rows had the grades numbered 7-12. I been told earlier that we have 1400 students at our school. As it turns out, the upper grades have many more students; probably the students from further villages attend another school until grade 9 or 10. Now, I’ve started teaching in all of the classes for grades 10-12. Only one hour a week in each, but I teach them all. That’s 18 classes – 6 grade 10, 7 grade 11, and 5 grade 12. I hadn’t really thought about the sum total, having 40-50 kids in a class. As it turns out, I have about 900 Cambodian students.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Striking things I saw today

1. Snake as roadkill. That was a first.

2. A refrigerator. I know, I know. I was shocked too. It magically appeared at my house in the middle of the afternoon. Upon questioning my host mom, it turned out that it was a gift from ‘the people who sell medicine.’ I asked if it was because my host dad is a health center director and would need it to store medicines. No, it was for buying a lot of meds to sell to people. (My parents run a bustling clinic/dispensary out of our house.) Even further conversation revealed that the drug company (?) has also given my family two motorbikes, two TVs, electric fans, a laptop for my sister, the wall clock/thermometer/calendar, 5 huge flats of Coke, 5 huge tubs of laundry soap... As it turns out, most of the valuable items in our house are swag. Oh, and there’ll be a new motorbike coming in a few months, the 2010 model. I know pharmaceutical companies in the states are pretty messed up, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t go over well if they went around giving doctors TVs and motorbikes. (Incidentally, the motorbike model in question is $1500, more than the base yearly salary for a full-time upper secondary teacher at my school [and, moreover, I should be clear that all of the details contained herein – salaries, compensation, etc - are considered matters of public record in Cambodia]).

3. A funeral pyre. Last week, an elderly woman who lived two doors down passed away. There have been a lot of rites surrounding her death, most of which have been mysterious to me. (I’ve been to one funeral here, but it was a three-month funeral - in Cambodia funerals consist of multiple occasions.) I heard monks chanting next door late one night, and not on a loudspeaker, which I found strange since so far I’ve only seen monks come to people’s houses for big, very public, events. I thought at the time that perhaps someone was very sick. I’m still not sure if that was immediately after she died or if they were issuing some sort of last rites. For the rest of the week, from what I saw and heard, there were lots of visitors, lots of chanting, lots of singing in a mournful/wailing voice. (Possibly professional funeral singers? My language is not advanced enough to ask about these things yet.) Today, I passed by the house and saw that the front yard was roped-off with everyone dressed in white smocks, standing in a large circle are the fire in the center. A drum was playing a steady single beat. In India, there was a special place where cremation occurred, and it was not a place that women were allowed to go. This was happening in the middle of the morning on the side of one of the busier roads in Cambodia. I didn’t want to stop and stare or start asking questions just now, but it reminded me that I still have a lot to learn about Cambodia.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Club Sandwich

Big day yesterday - the first English club day in the history of Taing Kork Hung Sen High School. High schools in Cambodia don't really do clubs, so it really was something bizarre. I had mentioned the possibility of starting one to a co-teacher in passing conversation on my second day at school. Since then, I've been getting When? Where? What? from students every day. For a week and a half , I conducted interviews for anybody interested in joining, about 120 kids in all. Some students couldn't even write their names in English. The most advanced 5-10 students understood all of my hardest questions (things like 'What is the weather like today?' and 'What will you do after school today?'). Given the range and the number of interested parties, I was...excited. You could possibly say I was freaked out. Just a little bit. But excited too.

Anyway, about 80 or 90 of the students had free time Thursday afternoon, so I decided on 1:30 Thursdays for club time. Since I can't even buy a snut of jake (bunch of bananas) without the entire town knowing, I figured I could rely on word of mouth to get things around. I told a few of my classes and maybe a few dozen students who asked me, hoping I wouldn't be TOO inundated.

Convinced there would be 150 men, women, and small babies showing up to gawk at my little experiment, I went to school half an hour early to be ready...

1:05 - Ok. Breathe. I'm on time. Planned activities? Check. Extra bag full of books and supplies to allow for spontaneous lesson changes should my planned activities sink like a can of Anchor in a rice paddy? Check.

1:18 - Whew. Nice, I've been able to meticulously write my entire lesson on the board as neatly as possible in peace and quiet without anybody staring at me.

1:22 - Ah, nothing like some good old PC-camaraderie texting to get the mind off what is sure to be this impending clusterbumble.

1:25 - Hmm, only five minutes until class, I guess I should look outside and let people know it's ok to come in.

1:29 - Huh? Hello??

1:33 - CRAP. I hate EVERYTHING.

1:36 - 'Hi Cher!' 'Hi Cher!' 'How are you Cher?' 'Did you eat rice yet Cher?' A line of 20 students files into the room from out of nowhere, all at once. 15 more kids soon join them. What's this? A manageable class size? Students eager to participate? They can actually speak some English? And they understand me?!

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

On Living in the Fishbowl

Today I arrived at school for one of my classes to find my co-workers having a heated debate. The question at hand: how much money I had changed at the market the day before. Apparently there were competing rumors. You know how word gets out. The paps have also been keeping close tabs on how often I drink a coffee from the coffee shop. To give them some credit, that actually IS a bizarre thing, for anyone who knows me. I’ve never been a coffee drinker, but I drank a few that my host mom bought me, not wanting to be rude, I figured out that the sweetened condensed milk they put in everything actually tastes pretty good with something bitter.

I hate to be a disappointing foreigner, but my everyday life is, well, pretty average. I wake up and take a cold shower, eat some bananas, go to school, do some laundry by hand, eat some lunch, go back to school, maybe study Khmer, go exercise for half an hour, eat dinner, then maybe read a book before I go to bed. If I feel like splurging, I might add a packet of drink mix to my water.

Actually, right now I do have some pressing business. There is a particularly pesky mosquito in my room, so I’m going to go hunt the bugger down with my Peace-Corps-issue electrified bug-zapping tennis racquet. And that’s my life.

Getting Started

I’ve been ‘Cher Lin’ (Teacher Kaitlin) to my students for a while now. Somehow they seemed to all know my name before I even arrived. It wasn’t until this past week that I actually started teaching. Things move slowly around here.

That’s not about to change anytime soon, either. Take, for example, the fact that my school doesn’t have electricity. First thing in the morning, it means no PA system, so the entire student body has to gather for flag raising and announcements, eating into 20 minutes or so of first period each day. It also means no projectors, tapes, or videos can be used in class. Copies are a possibility only if the teacher can plan in advance and pay for them out of pocket, so they are usually reserved for very important things. Instead, whole lessons – in our case vocabulary, grammar, and exercises – have to be written on the chalkboard, which takes a lot of class time, both for the teachers to write and for the students to copy. Partly, this is another shortcoming of the national English curriculum which, in addition to being WAY too advanced, also does not include any grammar explanations or vocabulary lists in the student books. I’ll have to reserve more explanation of the English curriculum issues for another time, but just believe that it’s pretty bad.

Also chipping away at class time is the Cambodian school schedule. Hours are grueling for students and teachers alike, with seven hours of state school six days a week and the majority of students studying 2-5 hours of extra classes each day. If teachers want to make a living wage, they have to either teach private classes or take on another job. Several of the teachers at my school have stalls at the market when they’re not in class. At least one is a tailor. One is a motorbike-taxi driver. The teachers who have private schools tell me they teach 10-12 hours a day. The private classes start at 6am before school, run during the lunch break, and sometimes take place after school until 7:30 at night. I think it’s partly due to this schedule that breaks between hour-long classes are set at 15 minutes, with the teachers usually waiting another 5-10 minutes after the bell before heading to class. Given the breaks, there are really seven 40ish-minute classes in a day, maybe about the same as the U.S. That’s before holidays (Cambodia has a LOT), rain (because who comes to school when it’s raining?), and teachers not coming to class (there are no subs here). I would say so far it looks like classes actually happen about 75% of the time at my school, and I actually have a pretty strict school director who doesn’t give extended holiday breaks and takes teacher attendance. We’ll also have to see how the year progresses, as December will probably see many students absent to help with the rice harvest and supposedly things will start to wind down after the month-long break in April. Cambodia’s education system definitely fits the bill of a developing country. There are lots of problems to tackle.

So yes, things are going to take a while longer than they might elsewhere. Who knows whether I’ll actually be able to accomplish anything. But the students seem genuinely excited to have me in their classes, and even that’s something. I’m starting an English speaking club this week, and I interviewed over 100 students who were interested in joining. It might just turn into one big catastrophe. Probably at first it will be. Still, we’re just getting started.