Advertisement
Published: March 4th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Our agenda for Monday was to spend the morning at the nearby
Tchey School, helping to clean and paint a classroom that will soon be turned into a computer classroom. (Solar power will be installed at the school next week, and computers have been obtained through the
One Laptop Per Child international program.)
Along the way to the school, we picked up Neil, a young Irish high school teacher who was headed to Tchey for the first day of his week-long volunteer English teaching. Our van was loaded with paint, rollers, and brushes, with a long ladder strapped to the roof and a cooler full of bottled water. We were on the road again!
Tchey school is one of the schools sponsored by the PLF, and is a few kilometers away from the guesthouse. A total of 780 kids attend first through sixth grade, attending either the morning or afternoon session. The school has a few buildings with five or six classrooms in each (up to 45-50 students per classroom) as well as a library and an office for the principal. There is also a temporary classroom made of palm leaves that houses some overflow students.
The grounds of the school
include some beautiful shade trees and some simple playground equipment, as well as rice fields and vegetable gardens, all tended by the children to provide food for their own consumption at school. Every day, the kids water the plants around the school, pick up the trash, sweep the classrooms, and generally keep the place tidy.
There is also a small palm-leaf “kitchen” building, where breakfast is cooked daily by a local couple of undetermined age and questionable sobriety. Apparently, they were bothering the villagers by sleeping in the fields and getting drunk all the time, so the school principal’s solution to the problem was to hire them to cook breakfast at the school. They are paid $15 a month and they live in the kitchen, sleeping on wooden benches. Apparently they are good cooks and quite reliable, which I guess is pretty easy when all you have to do is roll off your bench to show up for work. I really appreciate the creative problem-solving that went into this arrangement.
The school also has a soccer field, which had once been a lumpy, bumpy cow pasture. The kids wanted a soccer field, and the deal was struck that
equipment would be provided for them if they would create the field itself. For weeks, the kids showed up and dug at the field with their bare hands, smoothing out the dips and ruts until a soccer field was born. And to think I used to complain about being asked to clean the chalkboard…
The classroom we were to paint was about 30 feet square (I’m guessing here) with ceilings maybe ten feet high. The plan was to sweep away the worst of the dust and cobwebs and slap a fresh coat of white paint on all the walls. Lori and I took turns on the ladder - I’m pretty sure this one didn’t come from Home Depot, but at least it wasn’t made of toggled-together sticks - while Jaz and the Cambodians who pitched in kept their feet on solid ground.
At first, I felt bad about the paint I was dripping and splattering onto the tile floor, until I realized that the Cambodians seemed to be Jackson Pollock afficionados. Whether it was unfamiliarity with the process or just a lack of aesthetic concern, there was little attention paid to making sure the paint went directly from
the brushes and rollers to the walls. At times, Jaz and I took breaks from painting to wipe down floors and window frames with wet rags, but it seemed pointless: someone would come along to give an area another coat of paint and we would be back to square one. Some of the teachers came in for a while and also scrubbed the tiles, and then someone else would drip paint off a roller, step in it, and walk on their freshly-cleaned floor.
A few words about rollers are in order here. A day earlier, Lori had gone to the market to buy paint and brushes and other necessary supplies. The basics were relatively easy to come by, but a request for paint trays was met with confusion; the local method seems to be to just dip the rollers into the bucket of paint, which would explain all the dripping. Eventually, someone in the market suggested they could go to Bangkok to get some, but that didn’t seem cost-effective. The request for handles for the rollers, so we could extend our reach and paint the tops of the walls, was met by even greater confusion. After much effort at
explaining what she was looking for and why, Lori was eventually told there were no “paint sticks” available in the market. “The sticks are in the forest.” Great. There’s malaria in the forest too, so perhaps we’ll do without.
Or perhaps not. As the painting project began, Lori tried again and asked one of the local men helping us about “paint sticks.” Some Khmer consultation between the men resulted in this: “The sticks are in the market.” Apparently, where ever you go, the sticks are somewhere else! Eventually though, two long and relatively straight branches appeared and were toggled onto the roller handles. A bit heavier than we might have liked, but they did the trick.
The kids seemed to find the whole project quite interesting and often crowded around the windows to stare in at us when they weren't in class. As they chattered amongst themselves, I amused myself by imagining what they might be saying to each other.
The painting went smoothly overall. Thanks to the iPod speakers, we painted to a soundtrack of Joss Stone, Michael Franti and some South African music, finishing off with a little Aretha Franklin. We drank coconut juice (juice?
milk?) straight from the coconuts and guzzled water. Jaz kept up the pace nicely, brush in hand all morning until I encouraged her to take a break to go take some photos. My borrowed Texas longhorn T-shirt was splattered with paint and completely soaked with sweat, but it was a very satisfying project overall.
We left Tchey school in the early afternoon, eager for showers. We had time for some quick lunch before Lori, Ponheary and Jaz walked over to Wat Bo school to meet with the principal about the
Bridges To Understanding project. They will need to choose 6-10 kids from the sixth grade English class to participate, and making the choices could be an interesting challenge. They tried interviewing the kids to determine English proficiency level, but found that the kids were nervous and struggle more with spoken English than written, so they’ll go back tomorrow to try again with a written questionnaire.
While they were gone, I stepped out onto our second floor balcony to take in the view. It is essentially a view of the construction going on in the guesthouse: piles of sand and stone, bags of cement, piles of old wood and buckets and
rope. I was awestruck to realize that the women below me, dressed in long sleeves, long pants, hats, and scarves around their faces were mixing cement on the ground by hand and carrying it in rubber buckets. One woman sat in the dirt, barefoot, bending long metal rods into rectangles for reinforcing the concrete. Her equipment consists of a plank with some nails sticking out of it to hold the rod in position, and a hammer for tapping the bar into the appropriate shape. Having now peeked out there several times over a couple of days, it appears that she does this all day, every day. All day, every day. If I ever complain about my job again, remind me of this woman and tell me to get a grip.
Monday evening we spent a lot of time in our room writing, reading and organizing photos, and then realized at about 8:30 that we were exhausted but also very hungry. We decided to try “Apsara Burger” just a few doors down from the guest house, and found that it wasn’t too terrible - though with all the food choices available in town, I think we probably won’t return!
We crashed for the night by 9:30 - our latest night yet! - and felt we had enjoyed a day well-spent.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.286s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 5; qc: 51; dbt: 0.1408s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Miriam
non-member comment
Another Assignment
Find some chocolate and eat it for me! Also, a cocktail!