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On Sunday we had our Khmer language class - let's just say it is a hard language to learn! Although there is an alphabet, it looks very much like symbols to me, and our teacher was going on about how each word had a body and legs?! There were only 2 out of the 7 of us who went away with any words bar Orkun (thank you) and Jol Moy (cheers) - the most important words we need to know I reckon!
Later that afternoon we all met up again and took tuk-tuks to the Tonle Sap Lake, which is the largest mass of water in South East Asia, starting by Siem Reap and reaching down to Phnom Penh. At the lake we got on a boat - like most things in Cambodia it was not modern by any standards! - and spent a couple of hours sailing through different water passages and into a floating village. Although it is hard to imagine, the floating village was actually like any normal village, but just on water! There was a school, shops, restaurants, what looked like a floating hotel and even a Catholic church! The houses were either little fishing boats or what appeared to be rafts with walls and a ceiling. The particular village that we went to was quite a tourist attraction however, with restaurants and boat trips specifically catering for visitors, and I think it would have been a more insightful experience if we could have gone to a traditional floating village, but even this one was an unforgettable experience to see! The locals rowed around on small canoe type boats, and children were continually floating past in what appeared to be washing up tubs! Like every other tourist attraction, there were inevitably children begging, some very openly as they floated around in their transportation mode of choice, or others who held snakes and charged tourists $1 a photo. The rainy season has just about finished so the lake is at its highest point and the locals have a plentiful supply of clean water, but during the dry season some areas can dry up to just a couple of feet in depth and the water, the locals main supply for drinking, cooking and washing, is dirty and becomes scarce. On our return journey from the lake to the city we saw the locals celebrating the last day of rain by having streets parties and gathering together on the streets.
My placement started on Monday, so I cycled to the school with Vera, the other new volunteer on the same placement and our volunteer co-ordinator so she could introduce us to the staff. Which she did, but she then left after 10 minutes, leaving us in the hope that we would be able to remember the way back to the city... in the dark! We had originally been led to believe that the school office was located within Siem Reap, and that the school itself was 5km outside the city, however they are both within a couple of hundred yards of each other in the small village of Chreav. The school office is merely a rented room on the ground floor of a villager's house, and the school is a government school which the organisation, HERO, has been allowed to use for 2 hours each evening. We had arrived at the school around 3.30pm and lessons did not start until 5.30pm so in the gap the teachers literally fought between each other to talk to us and practise their English. Once the children started to arrive for classes we were brought across the road to the school and then introduced to every single class (there are 18 classes spread out over the 2 hours) which became a bit tedious as we had to introduce ourselves in each of them, so by the fifth class we each had a finely tuned introduction speech. When Vera and I attempted to cycle back to Siem Reap - in the dark - we inevitably got lost, and had quite an adventure trying to avoid potholes and ditches. Since that first disastrous cycle in the dark we have decided to take a moto to and from work, which is both quicker and safer! On our second day at work we were given our teaching timetables and have been given different classes to teach each day, however we are going to ask for just one class each hour to keep for a month because it is impossible to prepare for a different class each day without knowing what they learnt previously. We are also teaching the teachers (who are all volunteer students) and are going to be helping them with speaking, pronunciation and vocabulary, so from now on I will have lots of lesson planning to do!
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