ESOL: Time Unit. Time change. Eastern time zone. Phnom Penh: UTC = 07:00 hours. Time crunch. Timely manner. Only time will tell. Where did the time go? Time-consuming. Timing is everything. Time’s up. Excuse me, what time is it please? Another time. I don’t know the time. I have no time. Time is of the essence. We’re out of time. It’s time to go. It’s about time.
I think it’s about time to share my experiences working with Caring for Cambodia, time to be a tourist and not a teacher, time to move up, time for things to reach their culmination, time to learn, time to come home, and time to reflect. I started writing this as I sat aboard the crowded Paramount Express double-decker bus between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, but I am no longer coasting along National Road 6, sitting in my compact seat on the overcrowded bus traversing bumpy two-lane highway. I’ve been home just over a week now, so I guess that means it really is about time.
My last official day interning with CFC was Monday, July 21. After spending one week assisting with the administration of Rosetta Stone assessments at the other CFC schools, Bakong and Kong Much, I returned to the Amelio School for one final morning with Kimchhoeurn. This time I supported Kimchhoeurn as she modeled for the other CFC English teachers, Sinat and Chandra, how to teach the ESOL: Time Unit that I had written and we had taught together at Amelio School. The English for Students of Other Languages unit proved more difficult to write and create than I imagined. Now that it is written, bound, and shelved alongside the other CFC resources, I admit that I’ve come to appreciate teachers’ planning periods. Teaching proves time-consuming work, particularly when you’re teaching for over seven hours each day like the teachers do in Cambodia, six days each week no less.
After hand-drawing clock faces on twenty bingo cards, making three color-coordinated sets of the time concentration game, cutting out clock faces into fraction pieces that further explain the concepts of half and quarter hours, laminating pictures of watches and cutting up watermelons, I think that it is safe to say that the ESOL Time Unit was a small success. If you question any of the children, grades 3 through 6 at Amelio School: “what time is it, please?” or “what time do you study Khmer?” I believe that at least 80% of the students would be able to answer both accurately and more importantly, with confidence. It may not seem like a big accomplishment, but teaching about the time itself took time; it was no small task. The students began by learning different instruments of time such as “wall clock” and “watch.” They then learned to distinguish between digital time, the “one with the numbers,” from analog time, the “time with the face.” Once the students had mastered that, we focused on counting to 60 and then counting by 5s, understanding how the numbers corresponded with different places around the clock. Once almost all students understood those concepts, the long and short hands were introduced separately, only put together to “make time” when the students understood the difference between them. The children practiced telling and making the time using their personal paper-plate clocks, playing the time concentration game, and quizzing one another with the time bingo game. They learned fractions like “half-past three” and “quarter to six,” which the students put to practical use in sets of time questions and answers: “when do you go to school?” “I go to school at _ _ : _ _” and “when do you eat breakfast?” “I eat breakfast at _ _ : _ _ .”
Writing such an ESOL Unit, or any teaching unit for that matter is neither my forte nor my area of expertise. Although I’d worked with lesson plans last summer as a Team Leader, adapting them to fit the interests and strengths of my students each conference, I’d never formally written a lesson plan. Under the direction of one of CFC’s master teachers, Kaye Bach, I was able to come up with something that was both manageable to teach from an educator’s standpoint and both interesting and practical for the students. Just as rewarding as working with the students to learn “time” was modeling with of Kimchhoeurn, the English teacher at the Amelio School. I learned countless things from interacting with the children and writing lesson plans, I know that I learned just as much working with Kimchhoeurn. While we come from opposite sides of the Earth, we have more similarities than meet the eye. We are both 21 years old and continually asking questions, being curious, and trying to becoming better so that we might be able to find our places in the world. I know her words were genuine when she said that I taught her a lot, but I hope that she knows how much she taught me and how big of an impact she has improving the lives of so many children through education.
When I wasn’t working with Kimchhoeurn modeling the Unit, administering Rosetta Stone assessments, showing interactive DVDs about basic hygiene, working with volunteers from Belgium, acting as a guide for visitors, introducing Soy Sophea to new English words through conversation, or teaching Sarik to make statistical graphs on Excel for the Ministry of Education on CFC’s behalf, I was engaged in conversation with Savy. Savy works as the CFC Country Director and Superintendent of all of the CFC Schools; he oversee basically all of CFC in Cambodia. Despite his constantly busy schedule, Savy provided me with “go-to” support for everything- obtaining teaching supplies, answering questions about day trips and visas, taking me around to health clinics when my eye swelled, and everything in between. He was more than my “boss,” he and Mom, his wife, became my good friends. During my last few weeks in Siem Reap, Savy and I did a good bit of talking about CFC, Cambodia, and the current situation of both the organization and the country. Throughout our conversations we tossed around new ideas and brainstormed ways to get more people involved with CFC, how to teach English in a more conversational way, and strategies to make the CFC’s new shop at the Night Market stand out above the others, all in five minutes time. And that’s only a snippet of our conversations about Caring For Cambodia. Our other discussions could have gone on for hours, and at times they did.
When I began writing this particularly entry on the bus to Phnom Penh, my mother, her friend, and myself were overcrowded on account of the upcoming elections. The elections, which began in 1993, happen once every 5 years; they were scheduled for Sunday, July 27, causing all Cambodians to return to their home province for the weekend in order to cast their votes. Even though we weren’t returning to Phnom Penh to cast our votes, it was exciting to know we were in the capital city when the historic voting was taking place. Two days following the election, waiting to board my Tokyo-bound plane towards home, I read in Singapore’s newspaper the “Straight Times” that CPP, the Cambodian Peoples’ Party, had won the election in a landslide victory. This came as no surprise to me. Despite the emergence and increased popularity of other political parties the CPP has maintained its control of the Cambodian government. I saw CPP campaign parades that stretched kilometer after kilometer down the streets of Siem Reap and onto the roads around the temples within Angkor Thom and beyond. I heard rumors. Four journalists were killed before the election for the information they had shared with the public. Perhaps time will change things?
It is precisely this sort of situation that both discourages my hope for a better tomorrow all the while affirming the work that I have done with CFC to help educate the children. In our conversations, I would continually ask questions because I could never understand how anything could be accomplished when things appear corrupt. Why is it that millions of foreign aid dollars seem to disappear? Why is it that there are people living, and dying, in extreme poverty? Perhaps there is a disconnect between the people, their needs, and the millions of dollars of aid? I think that is a conversation for another time. While this situation portrays the situation in Cambodia as almost hopeless, it gives me hope that an organization such as CFC, working to promote the education of Cambodia’s children, can really make a difference. Perhaps when it’s their generation’s turn to lead the country, the children sitting in classrooms today will be able to harness their knowledge to direct both Cambodia and its’ resources exactly where they are needed most. But only time will tell.
