Permanent Site

I recieved my permanent site placement on tuesday. For security reasons, I can't give you any specifics, but I am going to a northwestern provence of Cambodia about 50k down a dirt road from the nearest highway and only another 20k to the border of Thailand. My hostmom is a midwife and works at the local health clinic/field hospital where I will be volunteering two days a week and my dad is a ministry official. I met my counterpart, an English teacher who grew up/lives in the community, this week in Phnom Penh as part of a large country-wide counterpart conference where each trainee met a counterpart from each of their site placements. He told me that my high school has over 3000 students, one school director, and about 50 teachers (total). He said that a typical class size is about 60 students, depending on the rice harvesting/planting seasons which will see a pretty dramatic drop in student attendance.

Tomorrow I will get on a bus leaving from one of the markets here in PP to make the 7hr (if nothing goes wrong/the bus driver decides to wait to fill up the bus in one of the larger cities before continuing on) trip out to visit my site and my family for two days. We still have a month left in training before we are sworn in, but this visit marks the beginning of our true commitment to Cambodia, and to our particular community. I cannot wait to see my site, and meet my family, my school director, and the director of my health center. The paperwork I was given says that the health center is really understaffed and desperately needs someone to help work with new mothers to promote baby health and safety as well as mosquito erradication in homes, and their new vaccination program that goes to other districts around my town to give vaccinations to children. It seems now, on paper anyway, that this community is receptive to having me there, and hopefully once I arrive as a full-fledged volunteer I can help make a difference.

I have also completed Practicum, which was a six day work week where all the trainees were in charge of teaching classes of about 40 Khmer students in our training villages for an hour each day. I taught my kids some tounge twisters, as well as some spelling games, and then adapted the national english currciulum for the rest of my lessons. It was amazing how after the first day of teaching, suddenly every student who was in the same grade level as me would smile at me wherever I went in the village and say "hello teacher! where you go??!!". It was just a tiny taste of what I will do at the school in my permanent site, but it got me really excited about teaching here. Students are, for the most part, extremely eager to learn anything you have to teach them. Of course, it might have something to do with the fact that I am foriegn, and anything foreign as we all know, is interesting... at least for a little while. Everytime I go to the school I wear a sampot and a collared shirt. A sampot is a long (ankle-length), wrap around skirt made of stiff fabric with traditional Khmer embroidery on it. I have pictures on my camera, but getting them from my camera to any sort of device that would be able to download onto the internet is a bit of a mystery at this point im afraid... The sampots I have are pretty beautiful, and I really dont mind wearing them, except for the fact that it feels like wearing a full-length carpet in 100 degree tropical weather AND its a totally new battle to try and ride my mountain bike down my dirt path in that thing while dodging cows, dogs, chickens, and small children on the way to the school (my host family thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen the first time i very awkwardly mounted my mountain bike in my full length khmer sampot to roll out to school... they laughed for about 10 minutes).

Hopefully I will have a chance to write again after returning from site visit, but until then, I hope yall are all happy and healthy, and stay in touch!!!

xoxo
K