A day in the Life Of...

1-27-08

My schedule is largely determined by what month it is. Since the school I work at doesn’t have enough room for all students, the day is divided in half. Seventh through ninth grades meet for one half of the day, and tenth through twelfth grades meet for the other half. Every month they alternate the half of the day. For example, this month the tenth through twelfth grades have been meeting in the morning, from 7:00 until noon. Then the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades come in from noon until 5:00pm. Classes meet for two hours twice a week. Since I only teach for the Upper Secondary School (grades 9-12), this means I have all afternoon off. Next week, at the start of February, this will change, and the Upper Secondary School will meet in the afternoons. This means I can sleep in. I like when they meet in the afternoons better.

Either way, my routine pretty much remains the same, but the times I do things changes. Usually I wake up and have breakfast at my house. My usual breakfast consists of apples I buy in the market, peanut butter I buy in Phnom Penh, and a glass of condensed milk and Ovaltine. If I am out of any essentials, I go to the market in the mornings. If it’s a month where school is meeting in the mornings, I then go to the school and teach. If it’s not, I’ll usually hang out at home and read for an hour or so. Then I’ll exercise and study Khmer. These two activities usually eat up an hour and a half or so. Around 11:00 or so, lunch is served. And then I’ll go to the school. If it’s a month where school is meeting in the mornings, I’ll come home around noon, eat lunch, read for an hour or so, and then exercise and study.

We usually eat dinner between 5:00 and 6:00. This is also usually the time that the cows come home. If you ever heard the expression “…until the cows come home,” now you know what time they were referring too. After dinner I’ll hang out with the family for a bit, then turn in around 7:00. I’ll listen to the BBC for an hour (Newshour comes on at 7), then watch an episode or two of whatever TV series I’m working my way through on DVD. Lights out is usually around 9:30 or 10:00.

On the days I do teach, I usually teach two or four hours. If the teacher I’m supposed to teach with doesn’t show up, which is frequently, I’ll sit around the school reading and trying to talk with any students who are brave enough to practice their English. I don’t teach on Mondays and Wednesdays, because the classes I regularly teach don’t meet those days. Mondays I will just sort of lounge around, watch DVDs, read, or go to the market. Wednesdays I will lounge around in the morning, and then go to Svay Rieng after lunch and kill the afternoon at the internet café.

Saturday and Sunday I also don’t teach at the school, but these days are pretty busy in their own right. I’ve started up informal, voluntary English lessons for students in my class who want them. These aren’t private lessons, and I made it very clear to the students that they shouldn’t skip their private lessons to come to mine. It’s more of an English club for a small number of motivated students. I’ve only been doing it one weekend, but it seems to be a success. I teach one class on Saturday and two on Sunday. Sunday mornings I eat breakfast in the market and then bike the 15k to Svay Rieng town. I teach a class at the wat there for the monks. Then I’ll do some shopping if I need to, swing by the internet café for an hour, then head back to Romduel for the rest of my day. Sundays are a bit busy.

Soon, I’m going to start up a karate class for students and teachers on the weekends. I’d like to get it going this coming weekend. For now it will only be on Sundays, but at some point I’m going to shuffle around the schedule and teach karate on Saturdays as well. I’ve got permission from the school director to use a classroom at the school for these lessons, so hopefully it will be a success. A lot of students have expressed enthusiasm for it. Also I’m probably going to merge the three informal classes into one after I get a good sense for how many people will be coming to them. There will be a little bit of a gap in ability, but since these are the really motivated students I don’t think they will have any problems with helping out their classmates.

In my free time, now that I have a laptop, I mostly watch DVDs or read. It’s not a very exciting life. I am going to start traveling more, probably after our In-Service Training next month. Kampong Cham and Prey Veng town are first on my list to visit. And at some point in the near future I’m going to go back to Kampong Channang to both visit the volunteers in that province, and to go back and visit my training host family. They called me the other day to wish me a happy New Year (they are of Chinese decent).

So that’s pretty much my life out here in Svay Rieng. Sometimes the volunteers in this area will get together in Svay Rieng town to hang out, but with K1 leaving in a few months that won’t last much longer. And when they are gone, I’ll be the only volunteer in the entire province. As far as I know, I’ll also be the only American too. The other K2 volunteer who was here went home last week. Not that I’ll be completely on my own; there’s a K2 volunteer, Michael, who technically lives in Prey Veng, but since his site is closer to Svay Rieng town than Prey Veng town (not to mention being on this side of the Mekong ferry), his provincial town is actually Svay Rieng. So I’ll really be the only one here on paper.

When summer rolls around, I plan on traveling abroad. Originally I was planning on Mongolia, but I don’t think that’s in the cards for me this time around. A lot of K1’s have gone to Malaysia, and apparently it’s not only really cool but also really cheap. Vietnam and Laos are also on my list of must-see places. Also I want to visit eastern Cambodia, where it is the mountainous jungle that everyone back home seems to imagine that I am living in now. And I suppose at some point I’ll have to get up to Siem Riep and see Angkor Wat. I doubt my students would forgive me if I never saw it.