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Published: November 13th 2009
It's been a busy week for us, and I thought I'd post a very quick update.
Monday was sad because we had to say goodbye to Mim. It seemed a loooong time before we had an email from her saying she had made it home safe and sound, which reminds us that we have a long journey ourselves next Thursday. (We'll be taking a van to the Thai border, a bus to Bangkok, a taxi to the airport,a flight to Singapore, then another to Frankfurt, and then New York, finally hopping home on a JetBlue flight. Today I tried to figure out if we could just fly from here to Singapore to shorten the trip, but it's not possible.)
Tuesday, Steve and I visited an orphanage about an hour away called the Children's Development Village. It's run by the Life & Hope Association here in Siem Reap, which runs several projects. This "village" is a collection of 7 or 8 small houses on stilts which house 43 children. The children are 4-19 years old and are divided into groups with a house mother for each group of seven kids. It's a lovely set-up, much better than many other orphanages, I'm sure. We taught their 12:00 English class, which hadn't been our plan at all, but when native English speakers show up, they are always invited to teach, so we did, and had a good time doing it, as always. We spent another hour or so just playing with the kids. We brought some books and frisbees and markers and foam construction blocks and everyone seemed to have a good time. The frisbees were quite a novelty - no one was familiar with them or knew how to use them, but the joy of frisbee is its simplicity, and soon everyone was an expert. (Note to self: bring more frisbees next time. If anyone has one lying around neglected, save it for us)
Wednesday we went to Tchey school with Jaz, and we had a specific mission. Jaz had bought paint so that all the kids in the computer classes could put their handprints on the wall, so we packed up the paint on our bikes and rode the 13 kilometers to school. Jaz's paint-buying expedition had been an adventure in itself, as the paint store people had a hard time understanding what exactly she wanted, but she eventually got through to them and bought 4 jars of paint, exactly as Lori instructed. (Interestingly, the paint came in what looked like peanut butter jars with no label of any kind.) Unfortunately, something was lost in the translation and it didn't take us long to discover that it wasn't a water-based latex enamel, as we had hoped, and it did
not wash off with soap and water. By the time we discovered this, two kids had their hands coated in paint, some paint had leaked out of the jars into the plastic bags so everyone had at least some on their hands, and the red jar slipped from someone's hands and half the paint spilled all over a bench and the floor, so even more kids got covered while they tried to help contain the spill.
So there we were: three adults and 15 or 20 kids, all covered in varying amounts of bright red paint that wouldn't come off no matter how hard we scrubbed, Luckily, one of the teachers suggested that we could use gasoline to clean it off, so Steve and one of the kids jumped on Steve's bike and pedaled down the road to buy some gas. How convenient that gas is sold here every few hundred feet along the road in old Pepsi and Black Label bottles! The gasoline did the trick, and after much scrubbing, everyone eventually got clean.
Later in the afternoon, after buying some turpentine, Lori and I went back to school to tackle the job again. In the meantime, the paint that we had poured into styrofoam trays to mix colors had completely eaten through the styrofoam, which didn't seem like a good sign. We bravely tried again anyway, but the second kid who put her handprint on the wall then had a reaction to the turpentine (even though we scrubbed with soap and water after cleaning off the paint) so we gave up once again. Strike Two.
Discouraged but not defeated, we went out on a mission that evening to find appropriate paint. Lori wasn't convinced that poster paint from the bookstore would even stick to the concrete wall, but I was sure it was worth a try - and the poster paint was cheap by comparison to the "enamel" we tried first, so we stocked up on a couple varieties of paint in an assortment of colors and gave it another shot on Thursday. Success! It stuck to the wall just fine (at least so far) and it washed off easily. Thirty-seven handprints later, the job was done, the wall looked great, and the kids were clean.
On the way back from the school Lori and I picked up a newly-arriving guest at the airport, while Steve and Jaz stayed behind at Tchey. Jaz had her usual class to teach, and Steve took over another English class. Before we came, he wasn't at all sure that we would want to teach or if he would enjoy it, but I haven't been surprised to find that once he was thrown into it, he has as much fun as the rest of us.
Todaay Lori and I went to Knar School with the new guest/volunteer, Mandy. She got her intro to Cambodian primary schools and teaching English (yes, anyone can do it!) and I held another impromptu health clinic. I checked on the boy who we had sent to the hospital last week with a terrible foot infection. The day we saw him, he was burning up with fever and his foot was swollen all the way to the ankle, red and hot and too painful for him to walk. Today, his foot was looking fine, though the story from his family was that the hospital had told him it wasn't that serious and he hadn't needed to come. They gave him three days worth of antibiotics and sent him home. I had been expecting him to be kept at the hospital for IV treatment, but I have to remember that this is a developing country and the healthcare system has some shortcomings. Thankfully, he seems to have recovered.
I treated a variety of cuts and scrapes, the most serious being two kids who had good-sized burns on their lower legs from brushing against a hot motorcycle muffler. (This injury is so common that there is a specific Khmer word for it.) They both had fresh burns which I was able to swab with antibiotic cream and bandage up in hopes of keeping the dirt out for a day or two while they scabbed over. No one would confess to having ear infections, though we had seen many of those last week. Either they were all miraculously cured by our minimal attention, or none of them wanted to repeat the experience of having their ears treated again!
In between all these adventures, we had been eating and biking and sweating and eating some more and sweating some more and showering several times a day. Steve and I have had a couple of morning bike rides and stopped to look at a couple of houses for rent out of curiosity. We've been to ther Night Market and the Old Market and the huge local market along the highway. We've bought and eaten extraordinary amounts and kinds of fruit, and we've made sure we stay hydrated by maintaining a minimum daily quota of cold beer. Sometimes Jaz hangs out with us in our room, and sometimes the little kids in the house come in our room to play and try our strange foods (breakfast cereal is a big treat.) We're having as much fun as we can possibly manage.
Tomorrow we get up early and head to Battambang on the boat. This will be a five-hour journey, but in contrast to the boat that Jaz and Lori and I took last year, we're going the luxury route and are taking a more comfortable private boat this time. It should be fun, and the scenery along the river should be spectacular this time of year.
We'll be in Battambang for two nights, and then we'll return Monday. We probably won't have internet access while we're there, but you'll hear from us again next week. In the meantime, I hope you are all well!
(I'll post more photos as soon as I can. I'm still frustrated that I can't seem to post any in the blog, but I'll post a link to other site again.)
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Mary
non-member comment
Teaching English
Jaz, Steve and Jess: What do you each start with when you enter an English class you are going to teach for the very first time?