First day at project

Up at 6:45am so that we could make the hour-long tuk tuk ride to our project, arriving at 9am. The journey was a crazy combination of the typically mad SE Asian traffic followed by bumpy and ridiculously dusty dirt roads as we headed into the rural villages just outside Phnom Penh. Alannah, Rachna and I were sent to work at Library 2 (again, a school, not a library!), a school for rural kids who otherwise wouldn't have access to education. The kids were waiting for us just inside the school gates and their enthusiastic welcome was pretty overwhelming - when I first arrived at my project in Thailand two years ago, us volunteers were generally either ignored by the kids or gazed at suspiciously!

Road to the project

Dusty

I was assigned to Class C, the beginner's English class. They'd been slowly working their way through the alphabet for a few months and I started off by watching the usual teacher teach them the letter 'W'. They basically learn one word starting with the day's letter and learn a sentence with that word in it - for example: 'Watch...this is a watch...my mother gives me a watch'. They do a lot of reciting as a group, then take turns to read the sentences individually from the board. It was pretty straightforward but I found a real problem with this approach - the kids were memorising the sentences, rather than really reading them and forming words from individual letter sounds. It was clear they had no grasp of phonics, as when I gave them two words starting with the same letter, they couldn't grasp the fact that both started with the same sound.

However, I had to stick with the same approach that the kids were used to, as their English (and my Cambodian, I guess!) was too basic for me to be able to explain a new approach to them. I decided to see how things went over the next few lessons before getting disillusioned...

On the way home, spotted a family of six all on one moto. Was impressed.

Ate dinner at the Orussey market near our hostel at the suggestion of another two volunteers, Anna and Andy, who'd been volunteering for over a month by the time we'd arrived. We got a very edible pork dish for literally nothing at all (less than a dollar I believe), with free soup thrown in.

written by

lucy3119 on August 8, 2011 from Phnom Penh, Cambodia

from the travel blog: Cambodia 2011

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