The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent VSO.

27 December 2010

Christmas

Gilly and Sam were hosting Christmas in their house in Kratie, a town on the Mekong river about four hours from Sen Monorom. On Friday, after finishing off some work at the secondary school, Jeljte and I set off on our motorbikes, carrying a first aid kid and two toolkits full of things we didn’t know how to use. We thought it was worth taking them, though, in the hope that someone might stop to help us if we had a problem.

The journey was fine though and really beautiful. We stopped quite a few times to take photographs and arrived in Kratie at around 4pm. It was really nice to see Gilly, Sam and Ingran again, and after some tea and cake we went to watch the sunset on the river and meet the other volunteers who were also in Kratie for Christmas. Much as I missed hugging sweaty drunk people in Crosby village and going back home with my brothers and sisters to snack on food that we shouldn’t be eating till tomorrow, it was a nice Christmas Eve and we stayed by the river till around 11pm – very late by Cambodian standards.

Christmas morning was good: we had a fry-up and lots of tea, opened our pillow-cases (we’d arranged to buy each other $1 presents so everyone had four each) and, starting as we meant to go on, opened a bottle of cava. We also had a walk around the town, stocking up on salad and bread for lunch and had a teuk krolok (a fruit milkshake) by the river, before going back for a cheese baguette lunch. This might not sound like much of a Christmas dinner but some of us got very excited:



We got through several bottles of red wine before meeting the others at the river, where we watched another lovely sunset (Kratie is famous for them). 





Then we headed to a place called Joe’s for a Christmas dinner. I’d heard bad things about Joe’s and, although it was nice to be with lots of other volunteers, it turned out to be pretty bad – in fact, for the first time in quite a long time, I was chucked out of a bar! This was because Sam politely challenged Joe on the prices he was charging for spirits, which were twice what was advertised in the menu, and Joe, being drunk, told us all to leave. I was very glad to as I didn’t like him and the food had been pretty disgusting too.

Anyway, being escorted off the premises was great as it meant that we ended up a party at Kratie’s university, which Sam had been invited to as he’d taught English there. It was lots of fun and we danced a lot, and when in Cambodia it’s always nicer to be doing Cambodian things rather than being stuck in an overpriced expat bar.





The following morning we ate all the food that we hadn’t had time to eat on Christmas Day, and left at around 11.30am. The journey back was also beautiful and, although Jeltje’s back got a puncture, a family stopped to help us. (This isn’t strictly speaking true: Jeltje stood in the middle of the road and waved her arms so they didn’t have much choice.)

 





Happy Christmas to everyone and have a great New Year! We’re off to Phnom Penh so I’m looking forward to that. 

17 December 2010

Work!

I think it’s time I write something about my work here. My job title is Community Assistant and I support the work of the Provincial Office of Education as they try to encourage greater involvement from children, families and communities in their schools. It is hoped that this will improve enrolment and drop-out rates in the province, as well as making the schools more child-friendly. Another of VSO’s objectives is to give people a stake and a voice in their local services and to develop a culture in which people are better able to hold their public services to account. Currently, there is very little accountability at all levels of public governance (even at the highest level – Hun Sen has been prime minister for 31 years, the leader of the opposition is currently in exile in France, and most of the press is government-controlled, so there is no real opposition to the government) and, although improving this situation is a long-term project, empowering people to become involved is a useful start.

As I had been told to expect, work is slow here, especially compared to my last two years of PGCE and NQT year. So far I have been visiting the seven primary schools and one secondary school in Sen Monorom district, to begin to develop a working relationship with the school directors and to identify what we can do to help. Charlotte, the previous volunteer, worked with the same schools so we are also continuing some of the projects she started. It has been interesting to learn about some of the barriers to education that result in a situation where Grade 1 enrolment has risen to around 87% whereas very few students make it to the end of primary school. Some students live too far from school and have no transport; some are needed to work in order to help their families feed themselves; many from the Punong group (Mondulkiri’s largest ethnic group) don’t understand Khmer which is the language used in all government schools; many can’t afford books and stationery; informal payments to teachers are common, excluding those who cannot pay; there is virtually no provision for (or even recognition of) special educational needs; lack of water or toilet facilities at schools discourage students from coming; many teachers are not sufficiently trained in child-friendly teaching methods and so lots of students don’t enjoy school; poor hygiene spread illness which also affects children’s attendance. Another major problem is that the district’s only secondary school  has just one boarding house for students whose families don’t live in the town, so children from the rural primaries tend to drop out at Grade 3 or 4 because they know they will not been able to attend secondary school anyway.

These are my initial impressions of the context of my work, although usefully we had a meeting last month between VSO and the Provincial Office of Education to make a specific plan for our work this year. We have been told to focus on one primary school and one secondary, to set up a student council and an effective school support committee in each that the POE can then use as a model for other schools. In addition, we will also work with the other schools on various other community projects, such as well improvements, developing school libraries or vegetable gardens.

After six weeks of visiting schools and making plans, this week we actually had some work to do, as on Tuesday we ran a workshop with 24 students from the secondary school on setting up a student council. We had discussed this in advance with the deputy director of the school, and it was agreed that two students from each class would attend the training, and then be responsible, with support from their teachers, for organising the election process within their own classes.

It was good to work directly with kids again (it reminded me of how much I missed the students from St Gregory's!): they were a really nice group, and they produced some good ideas. Overall, though, I was disappointed by how it went although I think I have learned a lot about how to do it more effectively next time. The main problem was insufficient planning and cooperation between us and the deputy director. It turned out, for example, that he had already organised voting, so the 24 students had already been elected to the student council – this made our sessions on organising an election process completely redundant, and the final hour of the workshop was an embarrassment as he and we were working to different agendas. I do think it is very important that someone from the school is fully involved in delivering the training and that was what we wanted from the beginning, but as they hadn’t been interested and had asked us to do it all, it was frustrating that he intervened so much on the day. In particular, we organised sessions to enable students to produce their own ideas about what the student council could do, being careful not to give too many suggestions of our own. (I don’t think this is very common in Cambodia as all the workshops I have attended have involved a trainer telling participants all the answers.) Each time we did this, he would very quickly fill in these gaps, telling the students what to think, which was, incidentally, quite a limited view of the role of a student council - I think some of the students left thinking that it was little more than a cleaning agency.

It was a frustrating day but a useful one: we’ve learnt to clarify roles and expectations better, and to cooperate more effectively on planning.

Anyway, apart from work it’s been a busy few weeks. I have been to Phnom Penh twice, once to see the doctor for an eye infection and once to learn how to edit the volunteer magazine, as me and Sam are taking over from the next edition. We are also making plans for Christmas and New Year and I’m enjoying the parcels I’ve received – thank you! We are going to Kratie for Christmas and are having baked beans and cheese and red wine. I never thought I’d be so excited about beans.

Here are some of the photos from the workshop:





And here is the roast dinner which we cooked last night in Jeltje's oven: