A week of farewells

Sunday 9 January was the first day of the 2011 Globalteer Siem Reap Junior Soccer League season so M and I headed off at 9am to watch the Anjali Under 15s play their two matches. Although their first game was supposed to start at 9.30, it had, in fact, begun at 9 – ah, Cambodian time! – so we missed the first half. We cheered the boys on throughout the second half and during their later match against another team but, unfortunately, they lost both games 1 – 0. They are all very competitive so were looking quite disappointed as they climbed up onto the back of the truck that was their transport home.

Marianne and I headed into town to catch up with Rotha, the young woman who had been our waitress at the Globalteer restaurant last year but is now working at the Funky Monkey. It was lovely to see her again – and enjoy a long cold drink after the heat of the football field. After lunch, M headed for a relaxing couple of hours by the swimming pool while I retired to my room to rest. 

That night we had a farewell dinner with M’s Khmer family. What a great pleasure and privilege it had been to spend time with them and share their knowledge of Cambodian life. I have been invited back to attend Narong’s brother Soria’s wedding – he’s only just met his girlfriend so the wedding may be a while off yet, but I am delighted with the invitation. 

On Monday morning M and I said a tearful farewell. We have become firm friends and I have very much enjoyed our time together. I’m not sure when we’ll meet again as I have no plans to go back to Cambodia in the near future, nor can I afford a holiday in the south of France, where she lives. But if the wish I made when she tied a friendship bracelet on my wrist comes true, we shall meet in some exotic place before too long.

My last week at Anjali went by far too quickly. In English lessons we finally started the text book and I taught some lessons alone as Billy the Khmer teacher was sick a couple of days. The kids worked hard and made good progress. We revised telling the time as well as vocab and verbs to describe their daily routines, so by the end of the week they were each able to give a talk about what they do every day.

In General Studies we covered healthy eating and the food pyramid, how not to eat too many fats and dairy products – actually, they eat no dairy here at all. Perhaps rural villagers milk their own cows, but the climate and lack of refrigeration means you can’t buy milk in shops and so there are also no dairy products, except those imported for tourists to eat. Still, the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables means the children are mostly healthy, if small by Western standards. Thursday’s task was to pretend they were restaurant owners and design a healthy menu for their customers to enjoy.

Workshops were fun. A German woman, Brigitta, had arrived to teach theatre workshops twice a week to each level of students, so we learnt how to warm up our bodies, mime some simple actions, sing an animated song, and played various games like Chinese whispers. Courtenay had the great idea to carve cakes of soap into animals and faces (and use the shavings to make more soap, so nothing was wasted), and the other day the children coloured in detailed pictures of birds and faces, which they always seem to enjoy.

Thursday was my last day and quite sad. I thought I’d be fine but when I read the letters the children had written for me, and saw the little presents – a handmade bracelet, a lovely drawing –  I became quite emotional. And some of the girls were clinging to me like little limpets. It was very hard to walk away, especially as I have no immediate plans to return to Anjali. At least some of the older children and Khmer staff are friends on Facebook, so I can keep in touch in a small way.

I enjoyed a lovely dinner that night with a small group of volunteers, then we tried our luck at the Funky Monkey pub quiz. We only came 8th out of about 12 teams but, more importantly, the quiz raised another $159 for Grace House.

Food hygiene and phenomenal growth

We were supposed to start the new text books in English at the beginning of my third week at school but it didn’t happen, as is often the way at Anjali. I’m not sure why as the books had arrived – a miracle in itself!



Anyhoo, we spent the week revising various bits and pieces: doing word and vocab games on Monday; learning the names of buildings in cities on Tuesday – not sure these kids really understand what an aquarium is or will ever visit one and, if they do, they’ll probably wonder why they can’t eat the fish; using those building names with prepositions in sentences on Wednesday – ‘The aquarium is opposite the fish market’; and drawing a map of an imaginary city, adding its buildings and talking about their cities on Thursday. There was no school Friday as 7 January is a public holiday, variously called Victory over Genocide Day, or Liberation Day, commemorating the day Phnom Penh was liberated from the control of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese.

In General Studies the topic was food hygiene, a relevant enough issue but it’s not easy to find teaching worksheets that don’t include ‘what temperatures your fridge and freezer should be set at’ or ‘defrost food products on the lowest shelf in your refrigerator’! As some of the Anjali kids don’t even have electricity in their homes, anything that involved refrigeration was out of the question.  



One of the women who cooks lunch every
day for kids, staff and volunteers at Anjali



I eventually settled on four basic points to hammer home to them during the week:

* always wash your hands before touching food

* always wash fruit and vegetables before you eat them

* scrub the cutting board before and after you use it

* make sure meat and chicken is cooked thoroughly before you eat it

On Monday we went through a reading on the topic – they laughed hysterically when I mimed the meaning of diarrhoea, something they could all relate to! On Tuesday, we did a quiz to see how much they remembered from Monday, then did some revision when it was obvious they had forgotten almost everything but the diarrhoea! And on Wednesday, they produced some colourful posters (no, they didn’t draw the diarrhoea!), which now have pride of place on the wall outside their classroom. (Sorry, I forgot to take photos of these.) On Thursday, I reverted to supporting the English lessons with a city buildings word search and ‘find the differences between two city images’ activity as I couldn’t find a way to work the food hygiene idea any further.

Our workshop activities this week included making Anjali signs to support their football team’s first game in this year’s competition, the first round of which was the following Sunday; origami – I had taken some multi-coloured and patterned origami paper with me and the school has several instruction books, so we produced all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures and shapes; jewellery making – I had also taken over a supply of plastic and glass beads, shirring elastic and plastic string, so the kids produced a variety of colourful bracelets and necklaces; and games. One of this week’s new volunteers, Courtenay from Tasmania, is a PE teacher and she had a great selection of new games to teach the kids, which they thoroughly enjoyed. 

The great success of the week was how well the garden was growing, and the fact that the kids were watering it every morning without being asked. Here are some photos taken the following week, on my last day at Anjali. The plant growth in just over three weeks is phenomenal!

One of the highlights of the week for me was actually not at Anjali. On Tuesday afternoon I joined Marianne and her Advanced class on a visit to Grace House Community Centre. Established by Globalteer just two years ago, it is a glowing testament to the dedication, hard work and enthusiasm of its manager Bridget Cordory and her husband Alan. It was incredible to see the advances and improvements they had instigated at Grace House in the year since I last visited. They have built additional classrooms, a toilet block, a volleyball court and football field, developed gardens for the local villagers to grow their own food, as well as building a vocational block, where they are already training older boys to be electricians and are about to start teaching woodworking and woodturning skills. Alan proudly gave us a guided tour of these workshops, showing us samples of the beautiful wooden products they plan to make and sell.

Grace House is a model school and community centre, supporting the poverty-stricken people of Kor Kranh village which surrounds the school site and two other villages located between Siem Reap and Tonle Sap lake. They have now achieved NGO status and operate independently of Globalteer, though still receive support when desperate and for special projects. Bridget told us stories of sleepless nights when she worried about how to pay for the following month’s rice supplies to desperate villagers, so if you have a few spare dollars, I can definitely recommend you donate to this extremely worthy cause. Here’s the link: http://www.gracehousecambodia.org/how_to_help.html

Angels at Anjali

My first week back at Anjali House is nearly at an end, and it's been an absolute delight to see all the children again. There are a few new faces but most are the same children I worked with and got to know last Christmas.

Most are taller, though a couple seem almost to have shrunk -- one 10-year-old boy, who's been sick recently, looks more like he's 5 or 6 and he's certainly not the cheeky little rascal he was a year ago. Most are more mature, though there are a few whose maltreatment and misfortune have obviously scarred them and left them mentally damaged. Most have improved their English skills, though not as much as you might expect for the amount of time that has elapsed. Most seem happy, though even the brightest have sad moments and need a comforting hug. Most seem healthy, though there are also a few chesty coughs and colourful runny noses. Most seem well-treated, though I did notice some rather alarming bruises across one little girl's back as she was changing into her school uniform today.

Such is the lot of the poor children of Cambodia. I wish I could do more to help them but it would take much more than one woman and four weeks to make any significant difference.

The good news is that I can help them improve their English a little, just by talking to them and spending a little one-to-one time with each of them. This week we've been revising present tenses and prepositions (and even my Upper Intermediate students at home struggle with those at times!) and practising forming questions. And today was their BIG end-of-year test, to see which students can move up to the next level. They were all nervous about it and most had problems understanding the test instructions, let alone answering the questions.

But Anjali isn't just about learning English. We teach General Studies lessons as well, so have revised last week's lessons on natural disasters, worked on their reading skills using the fable about the tortoise and the hare, and tried to expand their knowledge of Cambodian geography -- not easy with kids who think the moon is closer than Phnom Penh because they can see the moon but they can't see their capital city!

We've also sung Christmas songs, played some crazy games, made some very colourful friendship bracelets, and made Christmas decorations, which left more glitter stuck to the lunch tables, the kids and us teachers than to the coloured card they were using. Maybe the best thing I can do for these kids is to help them have fun, and it's certainly a delight to hear their giggles and to see their beaming smiles.

More fun tomorrow evening as we're having a Christmas party ... I'll tell about that next time.

25 more sleeps

I‘ve spent a little time this af’noon reading my recollections from my last trip to Cambodia, to whet my appetite for this year’s – as if that was needed. I’ve been looking forward to going back since I stepped on the plane to leave!

Some of my impressions, in no particular order:

©     the HEAT!

©     my room’s resident gecko entertaining me with its amusing antics, racing round the walls and serenading me to sleep with its chirruping.

    ©   teaching Buddhist Khmer kids Christian Christmas carols about sleigh rides in the snow, and a Christmas eve party with them singing those carols to the American Mormon family who sponsored the party

    ©   cute kids with big eyes and even bigger smiles

    ©   signs of a small world: a Kiwi having Mexican enchiladas for dinner with Irish, English and Japanese women in Cambodia

    ©   my friendly, like-minded, dedicated, international, fellow volunteers

    ©    the wildlife: tree frogs on doorframes, locals eating deep-fried crickets, lizards with bright orange spots

    ©    villages where everyone weaves baskets, villages on stilts, villages floating on Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Asia

    ©     the end-of-harvest wedding season, with bunches of bananas decorated in silver and gold, and loud speakers blaring out till the wee hours

    ©     incredible ancient temples, amazingly beautiful sculptures, unforgettable Apsara dancers

    ©     the kids’ constant chatter, Khmer’s constant smiles

You know your holiday is getting close when you get your suitcase out of storage and start making ‘To Do’ lists!

Getting crafty

One of the volunteers’ tasks at Anjali House is to run workshops twice a day, the same workshop each time, once for the morning children and once for those who come in the afternoons.

Anjali kids wearing their crowns

These workshops include arts and crafts, games and activities, and reading time. Much of the time we spent on arts and crafts last time went into making throwaway things, like Christmas decorations, masks and crowns. It was fun and the children enjoy any kind of creative activity, but I’ve been searching for more lasting, less environment-polluting activities for my next visit.

When I was checking out the Volunteer Service Abroad website recently, looking at longer-term volunteer assignments, I came across a news item about Project Friendship, their annual fundraising drive selling friendship bracelets. The seed of an idea was planted!

I don’t want to encourage the children to produce bracelets for sale, as that might lead to their absence from school, but I know their bright, imaginative minds will enjoy choosing the colour combinations and their nimble fingers will soon master the knotting techniques.

However, I had no idea how to make the bracelets, so first I needed to tackle my own learning curve. Googling soon produced some excellent websites, complete with instruction techniques and free patterns. And a trip to my local library produced some excellent books, with easy-to-follow diagrams.

I had some embroidery floss from a long-abandoned sampler, so have been using that for my first efforts. I’ve only mastered two easy patterns so far, but I’m pleased with my efforts to date and I think this will be a winner with the kids at Anjali.

My bracelet-making efforts so far.

43 more sleeps ...

When I went to Cambodia last December, my motives were many ... I wanted to escape the crazy razzamatazz of Christmas and the loneliness of a season traditionally spent with family, I wanted to pass on to those less fortunate some of my good fortune in life, and I wanted to explore a new country to discover more about its people and culture.

When I was first contemplating where to go and what to do, I had no specific ideas. I googled, checked out various travel company websites, saw something about volunteering in Vietnam and quite liked the idea of that. Then I posted a comment about the ideas that were spinning round in my mind on Facebook. Almost immediately a friend, Christine, told me about a friend of hers, Anna, who was then in Cambodia, volunteering with the UK-based charity Globalteer. Christine put me in touch with Anna, emails were exchanged, Anna recommended Globalteer highly and was enthusiastic about Cambodia.

In just 24 hours my decision was made!

And I knew I'd made the right decision when everything just fell into place over the following few days. I applied and was immediately accepted as a volunteer, my travel agent cousin found me a good airfare, and very soon I began counting the sleeps.

Little did I know then the lasting effect the trip would have on me. I shared delicious meals, incredible sightseeing adventures, and beer-soaked pub quizzes with like-minded fellow volunteers from around the world, many of whom became my friends. The crew at Globalteer impressed me with their affability and professionalism in often-challenging conditions. The people of Cambodia overwhelmed me with their broad smiles, warm welcome and eternal optimism in the face of sometimes extreme poverty. And the delightful children of Anjali House touched my heart, with their incessant chatter, cheeky grins and unstoppable energy.

Even as I stepped on to the plane to come home, I knew I had to go back. And now I have just 43 more sleeps till I once again tread the earth of the Khmer kingdom. I can hardly wait!