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February 9, 2007
First Week at School (Joe)
Friday 9th Febuary 2007
This week has gone pretty fast, working in a school where most of the classes don't speak English and I don't speak Kamer (Cambodian) is quite good fun but it takes lots of sign language and my Kamer to English dictionary to get there.
It wasn't such an early start to the week. We headed to Kanar school at about 8.30am. It is about 6km east of Siem Reap, the fun part was getting there with three people on the back of the moped.
Once there we met the head teacher and had a look at all the classrooms, most of which are still under constuction. Didn't do any teaching at Kanar on Monday - not sure why but in Cambodia everything gets a bit random and no one knows seems to know what's going on. We left Kanar at lunchtime and headed up to the next school Loli which is about 13km from Siem Reap.
Loli school is very small - only three classrooms. Unfortunately it is just beside one of the Ankor Wat temples, which is not so good because groups of tourists, 20 to 30 at a time, think they have the right to walk round each desk and take close up shots with camcorders and cameras.
The first teaching session went really well. We sorted out everyone's names which was fun trying to translate Kamer to English... and then spent the rest of the session finding out what English they had done before.
The rest of the week went well apart from the fact that the first leasson starts at 7am which is ok but we have to cycle 6km to get to Kanar and then 13km to Loli. All the children are really nice though and always smilling and laughing so teaching them is not as hard as I thought it. might be.
Today, (Friday), we went outside to play some games. Everyone loved it. We played catch and they thought it was amazing and couldn't stop laughing.
The week has been really good - hope all goes to plan next week but who knows...
Posted by admins at February 9, 2007 8:07 AM