Around Macedonia
Lives of Other PCVs
Cambodia
Editor’s note: We asked Liz Renner a PCV in Cambodia, to give us a glimpse into her service there. She
sent us this dispatch.
A good day in Cambodia starts with a soft sun
creeping over the window sill onto my pillow,
peacefully bearing me
out of my dreams into
the contented wakefulness of a new day.
A bad day in Cambodia begins with a dog
barking frantically and
incessantly at 5 a.m. Or
with a rooster crowing
at 4 a.m., setting off all
the other roosters within
a 1-mile radius. Or with
my neighbor’s work vehicle backing out of the
gate at 4:30, emitting a medley of Christmas tunes that I have
come to hate unreservedly.
A good breakfast in Cambodia consists of a salty bowl of
noodles, green vegetables, and meat. Or an assortment of small,
sweetened rice pastries and iced coffee. Or rice with fried pork
and delicate jasmine tea.
There is no bad breakfast in Cambodia. The only way to
go wrong is to not eat.
If I’m lucky, the sun (or the dogs, or the truck) wakes me
up early enough in the morning so that I can scrub some clothes
from my laundry basket by hand before going to school (and if
I’m extra lucky, it won’t rain after I’ve hung the clothes out to
dry over a bamboo pole).
The hardest part of my day gets itself over with fairly
quickly: the bike ride to school. The hard part isn’t the scenery.
I live on a national highway (really just two lanes of pavement), and between my host family’s wooden house, general
store, and the high school, lies a microcosm of Cambodia:
wooden houses on stilts, palm trees, cows, chickens, and small
stores where you can buy gas in a Coke bottle, a cell phone, or
breakfast. The hardest part isn’t the Hello Gauntlet, the tunnel
of continuous “Hellos!” from enthusiastic Cambodian children
standing by the road or lounging under their houses as I ride
by. No, that’s actually kind of cute. The worst part of my day is
trying to simultaneously pedal a mountain bike, wear an anklelength skirt, and keep my dignity. But once that ordeal is over
and I’ve arrived at school, all I have to do is dismount modestly
and park the bike under a tree to protect it from the soon-to-bescorching sun. Then I can get down to the business of teaching
English. Or at least trying.
Enrollment at Thma Kol High School, in northern Battambang province, hovers at around 2,000 students in 6 grades,
distributed relatively evenly between girls and boys (unlike
many other Cambodian high schools). Coralling all these students are a mere 45 teachers and administrators. Somehow,
though, they manage to keep everything under control.
With any given class, an English teacher gets 2 hours a
14 - pauza
week to convey all the wonder and joy of our language. The
good news is, Khmer students are either (a) very keen to learn
English since it is a nearly essential skill in the modern job
market or (b) very quietly apathetic because they think they are
going to become farmers. Khmer students behave, I imagine,
like American students behaved 100 years ago. They wear a
uniform (a white button-down top and black pants or a black
skirt), stand up out of respect whenever a teacher enters or
leaves the classroom, and generally act very polite and solicitous. Their most adorable quirk is that they call English instructors Cher, short for Teacher.
After the first class, the “bell” rings. As schools generally
have no electricity, bells are made of a metal pipe suspended from a tree, which a teacher bangs on with a smaller pipe.
For me, this means it’s time for a plastic baggy full of freshly
pressed, iced sugar cane juice with one of my co-teachers.
Cost: 300 riels, or just under 8 cents.
As soon as someone gets around to ringing the bell again,
5 to 25 minutes after the previous bell, the cycle begins anew,
until 11 o’clock, when we go home, teachers and students
alike, for lunch and a nap. This being Asia, the foundation of
our food pyramid is rice. We’re called to lunch with the words
“Nyam bai!” or “Eat rice!” Rice can be a wonderfully delicious
filler to dilute the strong taste of a spicy dish or fermented fish
paste (prahok, Cambodia’s national food). But sometimes the
pile of rice in my bowl is an Everest of white grains, and I feel
that I can’t force another bite down. When that happens, I go to
the market, buy a baguette, and pretend I’m eating it with a big
bowl of spaghetti. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often.
After lunch, my day descends into chaos. Some days, I
study Khmer (pronounced k’mai [rhymes with high]) with a local elementary school teacher, who teaches at exactly the right
pace for me, i.e., the pace of a second grader. Some days, I go
back to school to help teach a mercifully small class of 15 students how to use Word and Excel (the computers are powered
by a generator). And other days, I head to the local pagoda
and talk to some shy, orange-robed monks about Buddhism,
food, English grammar, America, or anything else that comes
to mind.
In the evening, I head back home to eat rice with my
host family and then
try to catch the latest
international news
coming through on
shortwave
radio.
Sometimes it’s worrying to listen to the
developments in the
Thai-Cambodian border dispute. But that
usually doesn’t stop
me from falling into
a dead-tired sleep under a pink mosquito
net, knowing that
the sun (or the dogs,
or the roosters) will
alert me to the start
of a new day.
Wetlands and bird watching sanctuary near Bosilovo (Strumica Region).
Prespa Lake (southwest side).
Dupeni Beach on east side of Prespa Lake.
“Devil’s Wall” hike near Sveti Nikole area.
winter 2009 - 15