WOW! When did I get so busy?? It appears that I have the same problem here as I did when I was home. I love being involved, and I have a hard time saying no or passing up opportunities.
So as I’ve mentioned before, I’m having a grand old time teaching my adult beginner English class. It’s particularly satisfying to me, because I get to give them a taste of their own medicine. I’ve been teased quite a bit because of my American accident trying to speak Khmer. And sometimes, I just speak wrong. And when I do, they really let me have it.
One day I had my photo album out and I was showing my 2 sisters bits of my life in America. I opened up to the page with my two cats- Linus and Lucy. I explained that they were different cats- one was a girl and one was a boy. Ch’maa sryee nung ch’maa bro. Well, apparently, this was hilarious, because there are different words for female and male when it comes to animals. My sisters proceeded to tell everyone in my village that I said girl cat and boy cat. I still haven’t lived that down. Every time we talk about animals now, they always bring up animal genders and tease me by speaking about animals with human language.
I also have issues pronouncing the word for egg and the word for older. So I very often accidentally call my sister “egg sister” instead of “older sister”. And the list goes on.
My oldest sister, the one who lives in the back apartment of the house, is the funniest person to teach English to. She just tries so hard, but makes the funniest mistakes. The first mistake I caught her making was mixing up the word for hand and hair. She pointed to her hair and said “hand!” So I laughed, and put my hand on my head with my fingers pointing up, asking her if my hair was pretty. And I will never let her live that down.
Recently, I taught my students good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night. My oldest sister gets these confused all the time. She came home from work at noon, and told me “good night!” She came downstairs after dinner and told me “good morning!” The best part about all of this is her face. She always has a huge smile on, and she is beautiful. She has really kind eyes that smile even more often than her mouth.
Sometimes when I’m eating, she likes to sit next to me and count to a hundred. She can pretty much do this successfully- but when she messes up… she starts over at one again. Haha you can imagine how that could get old fast.
During class, I will be teaching, and she’ll be talking to herself AT LEAST 5 minutes behind in the lesson. Sometimes I have to stop everything just to let her catch up.
The other day I asked her “what is your job?” and she replied “my job is 46”. I said “Oh really, then what is your age?”
She is quite lovable. I just look at her and I smile and giggle.
Now for a completely different topic- carpenter bees.
So I had a carpenter bee friend for about 2 weeks. Every morning I would open my window trying to keep my room under 100 degrees, if possible, and in would fly my carpenter bee. He would head straight to my door leading into the main part of the house and start chomping away. I would come home from teaching a few hours later, and find him in the same place, except at least a centimeter deep in his own hole. I would stick around and wait for him to take a break and go outside. Then I would take that opportunity to cover his hole with a piece of Peace Corps- provided- medical tape. Then the next day he would come back and just start a new hole. I should mention that this guy was pretty big. The kind of bee that makes you really uncomfortable even if it is not interested in you. One day, I finally had it with this bee. I let him dig himself a hole in my wall this time. What he didn’t know was that this time, he was digging his very own grave. Then, when he was in deep enough for me to cover the hole, I slammed a piece of tape over the hole, right over his butt. You could even see the point of his butt stuck to the tape. This was about a month ago. He is still buried under that tape. May he rest in peace. I’m sorry he had to go this way.
Enough anecdotes. Now for the serious stuff. Exactly what have you been doing that has kept you so busy?
I have finally started Khmer language tutoring. I meet with a teacher (who is one of my co-teachers) for 3 hours every week. Right now we are just reviewing everything I learned in training, and occasionally going over some reading and writing stuff. He is unaware of just how much Khmer I know. Anyone who knows me knows how I have a serious thirst to prove myself. So you can imagine how lessons go. I run the show and I ask him questions based on topics I want to know. Sometimes I yell at him for explaining things in English. I can understand Khmer! Let me prove it to you!
I also have the Honor Society that I started. That is also a lot of fun. I always leave there so proud of these brilliant students. It’s so refreshing standing in front of a group of kids who all care about learning English, and are perfectly capable of communicating.
This week I started a library development project. I had been asking consistently for almost 2 months if I could just SEE the library. They kept telling me no because it wasn’t finished or it wasn’t beautiful. Finally I convinced them that I should see the library because I could HELP them with it. So they took me to see it and..
It was even worse than I had imagined. The books were just in a heap on a floor. They were filthy, covered in spiders, and torn. So, perfect timing, the following day was a school clean up day, which means that there was no teaching. Students came to clean the school. So I enlisted about 20 students to help me begin to clean and organize. They came and they were helpful to some extent. We got all the books off the floor at least, and they were almost organized.
So now, whenever I have free time, I go up to the library to continue organizing. This stage is better to do alone, or with a very small number of students. I stole the library key, so I can let myself in when I have free time. There are 2 girls in the grade 10 class who always see me in the library, and they come to hang out with me and help. I love their company. They crack me up. We practice conversing in English while I organize the books, and they straighten the piles and sweep the dirt out of the room. Today I rewarded both of them with a chewy bar.
At this point, we have well over 2,000 books, but they are almost all really old textbooks- and they’re all the same. For example, we have like 300 of the same beaten up geography textbooks from who knows what year. Once I organize everything and take inventory of what we have, I need to figure out what to do with these books. I have ideas, but I need to run them past the school director. Then I will apply to an NGO to have books- real books- donated to our library. I will probably also need to find a way to get funding, because we are going to need shelves for these books.
It’s also testing time. Students in Cambodia have tests every month at the end of the month. I’m one of those sick teachers who actually likes giving tests and grading them. I guess I just like to see whether or not the students learned anything. So I have over a hundred tests to grade and whatnot.
I am happiest when I am busy, so things are going well.
These are all pictures from my room. Cute, right? The last picture is the hole in my ceiling. You can imagine the sorts of critters who live up there and make all kinds of noise scurrying about at night.
oh, and check out this video I made:
for a description, to see my other videos, or to post a comment, go to the actual video page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kra7P6o7NK4
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