Two friends of mine, Ming and Andy, keep a blog about their experiences working and living here in Cambodia. They collaborate closely with several high schools throughout the country on technology issues, and they have a thorough understanding of just how the "system" works.
One of my favorite entries details the school calendar for the 2007-2008 school year. (Each year is slightly different, as at least half of the Khmer holidays are based on the lunar calendar rather than the solar one. But the gist remains the same.) Officially, of course, for a list of school holidays one should consult the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport. But for a realistic picture of what happens in a real-live school, the unofficial calendar is more accurate.
So why am I not in a classroom on a Monday morning? Because we are welcoming in the Chinese year of the ox today. Happy Chinese New Year!
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The Garden
Towards the end of the rainy season, I decided to take a tour of my host family's garden to see what all was growing in it. There are actually a lot more kinds of plants growing out behind our house than I had originally thought, although I'm not sure if we eat all the fruits and vegetables we grow or not.
We have a growing number of papaya trees. The fruits start out green, like they are here, just where the branches begin to stem from the tree, and slowly turn yellow and then orange as they ripen. Sometimes, because the trees are slender, they become so overladen with fruit that they simply fall over. Luckily this tree is still upright and producing more papayas.
We also have an eggplant, um, plant. Cambodians eat small eggplants, usually just raw with prahoc (fish paste---delicious!).
There are a couple of thin young sugarcane stalks too. My host mom used to sell sugarcane juice in her store in front of the house, but then she broke her wrist. Because selling sugarcane juice is physically a lot of work (you have to shave the stalk; then start the press by pulling a cord, like starting a lawnmower; then put the stalks through the press), she stopped doing that while her wrist heals. In any case, we could never grow enough sugarcane out back to supply the store, so I don't know why we have these plants. Back at the end of rainy season when there was very heavy rainfall, a couple of the stalks (on the right side of the picture) fell over because the ground was too saturated to support them.
We also have a banana tree or two. Bananas are so beautiful!
And we have some pretty flowers that seem to grow on a plant that has no fruit.
Finally, we have a couple of mystery trees. I have no idea what those strange round fruits are. I wonder if they are delicious.
My tour of the garden yielded so many interesting discoveries. My only regret is that we have no mango tree. Guess it'll be fresh papayas for dessert this season instead of mangoes.
We have a growing number of papaya trees. The fruits start out green, like they are here, just where the branches begin to stem from the tree, and slowly turn yellow and then orange as they ripen. Sometimes, because the trees are slender, they become so overladen with fruit that they simply fall over. Luckily this tree is still upright and producing more papayas.
We also have an eggplant, um, plant. Cambodians eat small eggplants, usually just raw with prahoc (fish paste---delicious!).
There are a couple of thin young sugarcane stalks too. My host mom used to sell sugarcane juice in her store in front of the house, but then she broke her wrist. Because selling sugarcane juice is physically a lot of work (you have to shave the stalk; then start the press by pulling a cord, like starting a lawnmower; then put the stalks through the press), she stopped doing that while her wrist heals. In any case, we could never grow enough sugarcane out back to supply the store, so I don't know why we have these plants. Back at the end of rainy season when there was very heavy rainfall, a couple of the stalks (on the right side of the picture) fell over because the ground was too saturated to support them.
We also have a banana tree or two. Bananas are so beautiful!And we have some pretty flowers that seem to grow on a plant that has no fruit.Finally, we have a couple of mystery trees. I have no idea what those strange round fruits are. I wonder if they are delicious.
My tour of the garden yielded so many interesting discoveries. My only regret is that we have no mango tree. Guess it'll be fresh papayas for dessert this season instead of mangoes.
We Heart Art
Jumping around a bit chronologically, I want to talk about one of the projects I had way back in July: an art workshop.
Cambodian students seem to get pretty bored during the summer, with neither school nor organized sports to keep them busy and very little farming to be done. I wanted to give some local students something fun and productive to do and also encourage them to think creatively. So I put out an announcement that I would teach a month-long art workshop, and every day for an hour in July 10 to 25 students showed up at the otherwise deserted high school, eager to learn and do. I taught the basics of various art forms, taking about a week for each different subject. We started with visual arts: origami, cartooning, and collage using old magazines. The second week we talked about music and singing, including the Western musical staff and notation (was this concept extremely foreign to the students? Yes. Was it useful? Probably not. But that doesn't stop math teachers from teaching the formula for the volume of a cone so why should it keep me from teaching musical notation?). In the third week, we went on to poetry and rhyme, and the students tried their hand at writing a couple of short poems. The last week was all about Khmer dancing, including dances called the Madison and Cambodian cha-cha-cha. I'm no expert in Khmer dancing, but the school's PE teacher had taught me some basic moves that were easy to pass on to the students. We borrowed the PE teacher's car-battery-powered stereo and cassette tapes with Khmer music so we could all dance in sync. (If only we had had a tape with the Electric Slide!) Unsurprisingly, dance was probably the most popular unit.
The workshop was great fun overall, and I was struck by the talent a lot of the students displayed, especially during the collage portion. So I took pictures of a few of their collages. (My apologies for being an amateur and not cropping the photos. Technology is hard!) This first one is called The Green World and Beautiful of Life by a girl who gave herself the English name Lizzie. I thought she used an interesting combination of paper scraps and meaningful pictures to make a striking landscape. And she used the whole page!
Cambodian students seem to get pretty bored during the summer, with neither school nor organized sports to keep them busy and very little farming to be done. I wanted to give some local students something fun and productive to do and also encourage them to think creatively. So I put out an announcement that I would teach a month-long art workshop, and every day for an hour in July 10 to 25 students showed up at the otherwise deserted high school, eager to learn and do. I taught the basics of various art forms, taking about a week for each different subject. We started with visual arts: origami, cartooning, and collage using old magazines. The second week we talked about music and singing, including the Western musical staff and notation (was this concept extremely foreign to the students? Yes. Was it useful? Probably not. But that doesn't stop math teachers from teaching the formula for the volume of a cone so why should it keep me from teaching musical notation?). In the third week, we went on to poetry and rhyme, and the students tried their hand at writing a couple of short poems. The last week was all about Khmer dancing, including dances called the Madison and Cambodian cha-cha-cha. I'm no expert in Khmer dancing, but the school's PE teacher had taught me some basic moves that were easy to pass on to the students. We borrowed the PE teacher's car-battery-powered stereo and cassette tapes with Khmer music so we could all dance in sync. (If only we had had a tape with the Electric Slide!) Unsurprisingly, dance was probably the most popular unit.
The workshop was great fun overall, and I was struck by the talent a lot of the students displayed, especially during the collage portion. So I took pictures of a few of their collages. (My apologies for being an amateur and not cropping the photos. Technology is hard!) This first one is called The Green World and Beautiful of Life by a girl who gave herself the English name Lizzie. I thought she used an interesting combination of paper scraps and meaningful pictures to make a striking landscape. And she used the whole page!
This next one is called Advertise of Watch (no, I didn't correct students' grammar in titling their art. What kind of pedant do you think I am?). This one could be seen as a commentary on the large number of prominent watch ads in Newsweeks, our primary source magazine for these collages. Or maybe this girl really liked telling time. Either way, for some reason I was really impressed with it.
This last one is by a boy who gave himself the English name Peter. He created several distinctive collages using bright colors and basic shapes: this one of a fruit basket, a flower and a fairy, and a grinning pig's face (it's cuter than it sounds).
Hooray for art!
This last one is by a boy who gave himself the English name Peter. He created several distinctive collages using bright colors and basic shapes: this one of a fruit basket, a flower and a fairy, and a grinning pig's face (it's cuter than it sounds).Hooray for art!
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