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Published: March 5th 2009
Tuesday I was up early enough to join Lori and Ponheary on their trip to
Knar School, about 40 minutes away. They had a meeting with the teachers there, and I was interested in seeing yet another school, as well as looking forward to the opportunity to play around with my camera and tripod a bit.
The school is smaller than Tchey, and more rural. There are only two buildings, one of which has pieces of the exterior walls literally falling off, leaving window-sized gaps. While Lori and Ponheary met with the teachers, the kids were turned loose on the playground, and I wandered around taking photos.
I started out at a distance, grateful for my tripod so I could zoom in unobtrusively and without worrying about holding the camera still enough. At first the kids mostly ignored me, or watched me from enough distance that I didn’t notice them watching. As I strolled along, stopping now and then to set down the tripod and take a few pictures, a group of older girls eventually worked up enough courage to address me as I came near.
“Hello. How are you?” they asked.
”I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” “I fine. How old are you?” (Age, money, weight: no subjects are taboo here.)
”I’m 46.” (This caused some consternation and discussion among them as they worked that out.)
“How old are you?” “I fine, thank you very much.”
We had possibly reached the limit of our conversational ability.
Over time a few more kids got braver and approached, until eventually I had an entourage of maybe 15 kids, happily posing for the camera, then rushing around to see their image in the LCD screen. They got bolder and bolder, pressing their noses against the lens, waving their hands in front the camera, elbowing each other out of the way, and generally hamming it up. In the process of trying to get them to back away from the camera a bit, a game was created in which they clustered in front of me, responding to verbal and nonverbal directions:
“Back, back, back!” I would say, waving them backward. “Back, back, back,” they would repeat as they backed up.
“Stop!” I would hold my hand up in what I hoped was the universal hand signal. “Stop,” they would giggle delightedly, hands up, palms facing back at me.
“OK, go, go, go,” I would beckon them to approach closer, and you know exactly what they did in response.
This game was a barrel of laughs for a ridiculously long time, and then I tried to get them to continue on their own. They couldn’t quite get it together themselves, or they didn’t want to, so they just continued to follow me around the schoolyard, doing their best to insert their faces into every photo I tried to take. Did I mention they were all boys, or had you guessed that by now?
Later, a small group of some of the youngest girls approached shyly. I pulled a little Koosh ball out of my pocket and began a game of catch with them, which got them animated and giggling.
Around the schoolyard, kids were playing on the swings and slide, a rowdy volleyball game was going on, a crowd of boys played soccer on a “field” of apparently fluid boundaries, and girls were dipping a bucket in the well to draw water and wash off their feet and sandals.
I can promise you that there is no childhood obesity problem in Cambodia, though there is
a serious dental health problem. More often than not, the kids had obvious tooth decay, even on their recently-erupted permanent teeth.
Eventually, some of the teachers finished with the meeting and someone went to ring the school “bell” (an old tire rim suspended from a tree) and the kids quickly cleared the playground and disappeared back into their classrooms. As I peeked into the first grade classroom a few minutes later (the doors and windows are wide open to the outside) the young teacher beckoned to me. “You want to come inside?” I did, and she offered me her chair and began chatting excitedly with me while the kids went on reciting things on the board.
I quickly learned that her name sounds like “Annie” and she is 26 years old. She has eleven brothers and sisters, though there had been one more older sister who died during the Khmer Rouge regime. Her mother lives close to the school and is “very old! She is 61 - too old to work, and no teeth!” she laughed. Annie and several of her siblings support their mom, as is common here.
(Hey kids, are you paying attention? My retirement fund isn't looking so good lately...) This is Annie’s first year teaching, and she is very happy to make $250 a year at this school. She also works 3 pm to midnight six nights a week at the Island Bar in Siem Reap town to supplement her income. She wakes up at 5:30 every morning to come to work, but today she overslept and had no time to brush her teeth. She’s not an official teacher because she didn’t go to university, but the school was in need of one more teacher at the start of the school year, so she offered to teach first grade - all 48 kids, age five to twelve. All of this information, and much much more, was delivered rapid-fire, with a big smile. (Nice teeth, too.)
Annie was very engaging and energetic, and probably has a little ADHD, but was enormously likeable. She made sure to invite me to come see her at the Island Bar in the evening, and I told her I would look for her there. (Of course, I knew I wouldn't t be able to recognize her as I have a terrible case of face blindness and never recognize
anyone if I don’t know them well, but I’m pretty sure she’ll be able spot me.)
I left her classroom for a bit to take more photos and check in with Ponheary and Lori, and when I wandered back by again, Annie ran out to invite me back in. “You teach English in my classroom!” she suggested with great enthusiasm. “Write the letters here!” She handed me a marker and proceeded to erase all the beautiful Khmer script that had been on the whiteboard. What could I do but proceed to write the alphabet?
With some guidance from Annie, I began pointing to and reciting each letter, with the class repeating with great gusto. Clapping ensued when we got to Z, and then I wondered what we should do for an encore. Never fail - Annie to the rescue! She chose a child from the class to come up and point with a pen, reciting the letters again for the class to repeat back. More clapping, big grins from the tiny teacher’s assistant, and the pen was passed to another child, and we did it all again. One little boy who came up was so small that I had
to lift him up to be able to point at the letters on the top row. After his turn, I asked Annie how old he was. “Maybe four.” Annie replied. “He has three brothers and sisters in this class.” She pointed out two of them and then gestured to the back row of desks. “The other one is sleeping.” So this little guy wasn’t even officially enrolled in school. He was just here because there was nothing else for him to do and no one to take care of him during the day.
After many kids had had their turn - and despite my feeling that this was dreadfully boring for them, the kids never lost enthusiasm - I finally thanked them all and made my exit.
We returned to the guesthouse, where Jaz had been hanging out for the morning. Jaz and Lori and I went into “downtown” Siem Reap for lunch, strolling up and down Pub Street before deciding on The Soup Dragon. We had a nice meal (chicken sandwich for Jaz and Beef
Lok Lak for me), and then stopped at the “housewares” section of the local market to pick up a couple of odds
and ends we needed for our room. I need a coffee mug, Jaz needed a cereal bowl, and we needed spoons. Oddly, the only kind of spoons we could find were Chinese-style soup spoons, which ought to make eating cereal a bit of an adventure.
Our afternoon mission was to buy bicycles for Jaz and me. Ponheary took us to a used bike shop, where we picked out two bikes from the hundreds parked tightly next to each other in neat rows in front of the shop. I asked Ponheary if we could get baskets for the front of the bikes. “Oh, they will put on baskets for you,” she assured us. How about locks? Yes. And lights for riding at night? Of course! After we chose the bikes we wanted, three young men got to work, pumping up the tires, installing all the options, adjusting the seats, and making sure everything was road-worthy. We gave them a test-drive and all was in order. We had comfortable seats, nice high curvy handlebars, baskets, bells, lights, and excellent Amsterdam-style kickstands and locks. We paid the nice men $35 per bike and rode away happy.
We also rode away just
slightly terrified. The bike shop happened to be located on a busy stretch of Highway 6, Cambodia’s biggest road. For those at home, this stretch of the highway resembles something like Williston Road - two wide lanes with businesses lining both sides of the road so there is constant turning on and off the highway. There are trucks, vans, cars, minibuses, motos, tuktuks, mopeds, and bikes all moving at a pretty steady pace, and no traffic lights to speak of. The only thing to do was get on the bikes and start pedaling, doing our best with that left turn out of the bike shop.
Luckily, traffic moves steadily but not at breakneck speed, and everyone seems to be very aware of other drivers of all kinds. It was much less difficult than I anticipated. The only really tricky thing about riding a bike in Cambodia is making left turns. In order to make a left turn on a bike, you need to move from the far right edge of the road (they drive on the same side of the road we do at home, so you're riding with the traffic) all the way to the far left (in
the lane with oncoming traffic) just before getting to the intersection. This allows you to take the left turn hugging the edge of the road on the left, with oncoming traffic passing you now on your immediate right. After making the turn, you begin to look for opportunities to move back across both lanes so you can end up on the far right edge of the road again. It sounds potentially deadly, but it works quite well, and of course most streets here are not as busy and crowded as Highway 6!
I’m thrilled to have bikes. Siem Reap is completely flat, and traffic truly is manageable, so we’ll be able to cover more ground a lot more quickly as we gallivant around town. That can only mean more adventures and photos to come!
We spent our evening at the Night Market, where Jaz happily browsed, bargained, and bought stuff for her friends while Lori and I hung out at the Island Bar enjoying a couple of drinks and chatting with Annie, the Knar first grade teacher. Annie was thrilled to see us, and excited to meet Jaz. She commented on Jaz's lovely white skin - we laughed
about how as lily-white Americans, all we want is a good tan. "How can I get beautiful brown skin like yours?" I asked her. "I think you must become a rice farmer!" she suggested. She admired Jaz's nose ("My nose not good - see, no nose!"), she suggested we find her a husband because she's too busy to find one, she told us how she bought a plot of land 20 x 20 (meters, I suppose) for $350 so her sister could vegetables to sell, and how she would like to go back and finish the 12th grade because she didnt' really pay attention the first time around. (Didn't pay attention? Hard to believe! Maybe she was chatting too much...) She's really adorable, and hugged us all goodbye when we left.
Our final stop this evening was at
Dr Fish Foot Massage. If you sat and thought about that name for a few minutes and tried to imagine what services were offered, I feel rather confident that you would not come up with the correct answer, so let me explain: At
Dr Fish Foot Massage, you sit on the edge of large round hot-tub sort of basin and
swing your feet over the side until they're dangling in the water within. And as you sit there, hundreds and hundreds of little fish nibble all over your feet, allegedly eating off all the dead skin. So it's not so much a "massage" as it's a sort of pedicure. And it's not so much a "pedicure" as it is completely hysterical! For those who are ticklish, there's definitely more of a challenge involved, but after much shrieking and laughter, we were all able to sit still and enjoy our 15 minutes of being nibbled. The fish are quite enthusiastic about their mission, and those who are not actively consuming your dead skin cells tend to line up staring up at you, gulping the surface of the water and staring at you expectantly. (What do they want?!?!) The men running this crazy thing had a tendency to break into Khmer serenades in between hawking their services to passers-by. "Fish Massage! You no happy, you no pay!"
I think that in order to effectively make a dent in the dead skin of the average foot, one would have to spend a lot longer than 15 minutes with Dr Fish, but we
certainly got our three bucks' worth of entertainment out of it, so no complaints.
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Corky
non-member comment
Immense Pleasure
Hi Jess! Hi Jaz! You can't imagine the pleasure you give Lindol and I every day with your blog, as we sit here looking at the snow outside feeling a bit cabin feverish. Waking up in March with negative temperatures you are providing us with a brief respite with your wonderful descriptions of your visit. It makes me realize just how much luxury we live with and that I should just quit my bitchin'. Thanks for your good works and your blogging.