Rain Day

Despite my claims that rainy season has ended, there are still occasional showers that make life unpredictable. Last week the weather in Cambodia once again threw me for a loop. (Forgive me if I've turned into an old lady, talking about the weather all the time.)

One night last week we had a powerful storm (lying in my bed I got sprinkled because my window wasn't closed tight enough and the rain came in through the cracks between boards in the wall). The storm kept up through the morning. I didn't really want to go to school in the rain but it's my job so I put on my skirt and biked reluctantly to the school. When I got there, I found that only about a quarter to a third of the students had shown up that morning. About the same proportion of teachers showed. The teachers, after seeing the half-full classrooms, decided they couldn't teach, as they would simply need to do the lessons over again when all the students returned. So all the teachers hung out under the eaves in front of the school office, chatting. Once the students realized that there would be no instruction, they drifted away as well, slowly riding their bikes and motos out of the schoolyard and back to their homes. Once the teachers felt that the students were gone for good, we left as well. By the time the sun came out around 9 o'clock, the schoolyard was empty.

Frustrating? Of course. After all, we live in Cambodia. It rains here. Students can't just skip school every time it rains: they'd never learn anything. But somehow just enough truancy was involved on all sides so that the teachers could blame the students (for not coming) and the students could blame the teachers (for not teaching). Since my coteacher had left by the time I got to school, and he was the one with the copies of the test we were to give that day, I decided not to make a point by teaching my half-empty classroom. I just let it go and drifted away myself, complicit in the students' and teachers' one-day escape.