"fine dining" a la Cambodge

Lately I've becoming more ambitious with my cooking. I made two batches of cookies from scratch last week using my "dutch oven" which is a pan elevated inside a larger pot holding water to basically create a convection oven. One batch was sugar cookies, which were missing vanilla extract, but still turned out ok. The second was peanut butter cookies. I had to try some different size cookies because they were kind of crumbly and fell apart but when I made it into more of a loaf, and just filled the pan with dough they cookie/bars turned out really well.

Peanut butter cookie bars.

This weekend I got more ambitious and made gnocchi from scratch! It was actually really easy. You just make plain, dry mashed potatoes with 4 potatoes and then mix/knead in 3-4 cups of flour until the dough is not sticky any more, but not hard either. The recipe said you should roll the dough into snakes and then cut 2cm pieces but my dough wasn't snakey, so I just rolled small balls of dough and boiled them until they floated. It was really tasty with some homemade tomato sauce on top. 

Gnocchi and tomato sauce, all made from scratch :)

Cruising to the market in Kampong Thom.

I'm hoping to pick up some groceries in town that I can't get in my village and try some new recipes. Maybe some hummus and flat bread! 

hardworking English learners

Here are some pictures of my English Club students! They try really hard and have improved since the beginning of the year. A few of them have been my students the whole time I've been in Cambodia. Seeing them improve makes it all worth it. Well, it keeps me here anyway...

My English Club! In case you were wondering what your name sake looks like, from left to right the back row is: Abraham Lincoln, Michael, Brad, Mr. Jackson (as in the pop star, but we already had a Michael), and Ryan. Middle row, the girls: Lindsay, Margaret, Diana, Lorissa, Davina, Brenda. The front row: Robert, Aaron, Andrew, Christian, Rosa, Stephanie, and Kelly. :)

All the girls! I don't know what that pose is when they put the Nike Swoosh in front of their chin... Kelly looks like a Korean pop star in the front row haha

And the boys... Mr. Andrew hamming it up in the front. For the record when I said I would take a picture of the girls they got into a picture formation in about ten seconds flat. It took the boys A LOT longer to figure it out...

TBIT: Thank Buddha it's Thursday

It has been a long week, and I'm glad it is Thursday. Actually, yesterday was just a long day since I teach the most hours on Wednesdays, so when I make it to Thursday I can relax. The worst hour of my Tuesdays and Wednesdays is always the lower-level English class I teach. It is so frustrating because I can't do the more complicated and fun exercises and discussions I do with all my other, more advanced classes. Also, I have to ask them every week to stop speaking Khmer in class. Now I know how my foreign language teachers felt in high school. I guess in college they didn't really care, because at that point its your own damn fault if you fail.
Anyway, today I only have to teach my advanced students. I spent a little longer than I had hoped "reviewing" the phrase "used to" in my grammar class. It says in the book that they should be reviewing the grammar point, but as usual they were never really taught it in the first place. So I explained the difference between "I used to go to Angkor Wat" and "I have been to Angkor Wat". It is confusing because in Khmer there isn't really a differentiation between the two, grammatically at least. I think the students were starting to understand by the end of the hour though. So that is progress.
We played pictionary yesterday in my conversation club. The kids were getting tired of the more serious topics/assignments I've been giving so we lightened it up a little bit. They all told me that, "when we play games like this, English club is so happy!". Of course the kids on the losing team may not have felt the same way. Then they all decided they wanted to take pictures with me on their cell phones. I was not looking my best, but then again, when am I in Cambodia??? The I heart NY shirt Robin sent me is going to be infamous as it has been immortalized in hundreds of pictures with me and various students.
So far today is better than yesterday, starting off right with a nice big plate of rice and pork. I wish I had my camera at the market, because it was a quite pleasant looking spread. Just the right amount of pork, sliced cucumbers, and egg. Instead, I've included some pictures of the backyard decorations my landlord has been working on. She put in a trelice (spelling???) and put some beautiful orchids on it. I told her it looked quite sa'at (beautiful). Then she added some bright orange fake leaves.... and some fake grapes. I guess it is sa'at jee-ung now (more beautiful) in the Cambodian sense...

Back on track

After much delay I am back online. Thanks to my parents my computer has been returned to Cambodia and I now have internet! I don't think I can possibly catch up on what has happened since my last post, as it has been months!!! But I had a wonderful summer full of visitors (see pictures, and for the record I wore a white shirt and green shorts that day with my parents too, and it was definitely an accident) and as this IS Cambodia not TOO much has really changed.

I'm starting to feel like I'm in the home stretch now, though I think that's wishful thinking as we still have about seven months left of service. I've been striving to spend as much time as possible just working with my students. I absorb their every free hour with English class, hoping to give them every opportunity to learn English for free while I am here. I teach a grammar and vocabulary review class during the lunch hour, I have an English conversation club four evenings a week with 19 dedicated students, and four students who come to my house for a sort of "book club" to read stories.
The hours I spend with my students really fly by, and I'm actually seeing some improvement. Whether or not that has anything to do with my teaching skills I don't know, but it is nice to see.

All the students in my club chose "American" names at the beginning of the school year either from a list I provided or one they knew of on their own. It is funny when the students' personalities align with that of their namesakes (all the names I gave were those of people I know, which makes it more fun for me). The two real odd-ball choices were Davina, whose real name is Mary. The only student with a name that was already American invented a totally random name, but if it works for her that's fine.
And then there is Abraham Lincoln. I can't tell if he thinks we know each other well enough to make jokes, or he really dislikes me. His vocabulary is quite extensive (although his pronunciation is HORRIBLE and I have no idea what he is saying half the time) and he always commits fully to the activities I assign in class. But then he makes these horribly off-color comments or says the most morbid things! I found out recently his mother was murdered a few years ago, so I've been trying to be more understanding of where his strange sense of humor comes from, but I've been tempted to kick him out a few times for being inappropriate, rude, or just saying freaky things. Unfortunately, there's no John Wilkes Booth in the class (history jokes!).
For the record, Margaret and Andrew are two of my favorite students and are both incredibly clever. Lindsay is one of the sweetest students I know, and she has a twin sister who chose the name Alyson (who was also in my health club). And of course, Lorissa is sassy. That's the best way to describe her. She's got sass for days.
I plan to post more often in case there's anyone out there who is still interested in my daily happenings (now that I have super internet at site!!!) so for now a brief catch-up will suffice.
Belated Happy Holidays and New Year to everyone! 2011 is looking good so far.

Temporary delay

My apologies for the great length of time between posts. . . I know everyone is just dying to know what's new in rural Cambodia, that old hot spot of trend setters and world changing political movements. I had a whole post written up about this summer, and my travels and visitors and then my laptop gave out on me. It literally just died while i was in the middle of something. Odds are not something important, but still. So I took it to the place that has a decent rep for rehabilitating computers in Siem Reap. The technician was really nice, inspected and tested everything and then concluded, "It's the motherboard." "Is that bad?" I asked, but based on the name alone I was pretty sure it was bad. The kindly computer technician told me it couldn't be fixed. My laptop had up and died, taking that last un posted blog post with it, as well as an article destined for our in country Peace Corps newsletter, some npr podcasts, and a few academic papers written my senior year of college. So long story short I am sans computer at least for the time being. Maybe in the time lapse I can think of something entertaining and witty to post when I next have computer access. In the meantime I anticipate reading a lot. . . There are worse things.

When one door closes…

This week the Cambodian school year officially came to a close. Today may or may not have been the school closing ceremony. I went to school at the time the school director told me the ceremony would start, but none of the teachers were there, nor was the school director. One of my coteachers showed up maybe 20 minutes later and told me no one knew if the school would close that day, because it would happen whenever the school director got there. I asked him to call me if would be that day, and he didn’t, so I’m assuming the school director didn’t show up. I’ll try again tomorrow. I watched Sleepless in Seattle all the way through for the first time, so it wasn’t a total waste of a morning.

The Cambodian school calendar is very bizarre. It begins in late September or October and finishes end of June. School runs Monday through Saturday, and in my village upper secondary (grades 10-12) is 7:00am – noon and lower secondary school (grades 7-9) is 1:00pm – 5:00pm. There isn’t enough space to have two schools run all day, so they share. This is fairly common in poorer areas. Lucky for me I only teach high school so I don’t have to go back to school in the afternoon when it is blazing hot out.

Since the beginning of April school has been kind of a joke… more so than usual. Vacation for Khmer New Year lasted the whole month of April, more likely than not because it is just too hot to teach/learn then. In May some students returned, but numbers were definitely lower than before. There were more days when teachers just wouldn’t teach than before. By 11:00am most students had gone home, and the school was a ghost town by noon. Considering that even during the first semester when my classes actually met every time they were supposed to each “hour” of class was about 40 minutes, students barely get any instructional time compared to the US.

I am extremely happy to put the first year of teaching behind me. My experience teaching in the classroom has been more or less a disappointment. I had fairly high expectations of the results I would get by the end of one year. While we were appropriately warned about the condition of the Cambodian school system during training, I was unprepared to have so many students who just did not know any English. The low level was a total shock. Additionally, neither of my coteachers were interested in lesson planning. I tried a few times to set aside some time each week to meet with them and plan our lessons, but it was pointless. They teach the same book every year, and don’t deviate from the activities and material in it, so there is no reason to lesson plan. I was taking up their precious free time, so I let it go. When I came with a warm-up activity prepared they were both usually willing to let me have a few minutes at the beginning of class. That is something I hope to implement consistently next year.

I’ll admit I got lazy after awhile. I tried different things to get students engaged, but usually my tactics just took up too much time for my coteachers to be willing to let me consistently use them. For some months I was typing up worksheets for my tenth graders with a definition and example sentence for every vocabulary word and some activities for them to do at home for extra points. I think this was helpful, but just not something sustainable that my coteachers will continue after I’m gone. It took me hours to grade and correct all the papers, sort out the cheaters, record the scores, prepare the worksheet for the next chapter, etc. Then I had to make copies which was a HUGE pain in the butt. The copy room at school is never open, and they wouldn’t trust me to make copies on my own. I had to wait around for a student who worked in the copy room part time (? I am still confused about exactly what the deal was there). Then I had to collect money for the copies, which I felt badly about since students have enough expenses and most of them didn’t give a rat’s ass about the worksheets.

I am, however, optimistic that I can use what I learned this year to improve my teaching next year. I plan to be more consistent about warm-up activities. Also, I usually tried to really emphasize the grammar points that I thought were useful. I hope to communicate to my coteachers which points are really good and are a good use of time to practice, and which are less useful. Some volunteers have really developed great resources which I could have used more in the classroom this year, and I will refocus on those next year.

While teaching in the classroom didn’t exactly go as well as I’d hoped, my English club and health club were both very successful. I’ll have a better idea for next year how to structure a successful English club. I should definitely make it more specific, rather than just a random selection of stories, songs, activities and what not. Hopefully my health club continues to go as well as it’s been going these last few weeks! I have high hopes that the girls in the club will stay committed through the summer, and put together a great project at the end.

And now I can just prepare for my parents and friends to visit!!! Thank goodness it’s summer!

Malaysia, Truly Asia

There are these great ads that run on tv here promoting tourism in Malaysia. The slogan is “Malaysia, truly Asia.” I’m not sure how accurate that slogan is though, considering most people probably think of Japan or Vietnam before Malaysia, but it is catchy, I’ll give them that.
Christine, my sorority sister, came to visit at the beginning of June. It was my first time leaving the country, which really put Cambodia in perspective for me. We of course saw Angkor Wat and all the sights in Phnom Penh, and then flew to Kuala Lumpur, the capitol of Malaysia. It was a big shock to fly out of Cambodia and right into a real, modern city. Even the Malaysian airport had a Starbucks and a McDonalds, beacons of westernization if you ask me. We explored all over the city, saw the view from the Petronas twin towers (after being forced to watch an incredibly creepy video about the power of oil that reminded me of a futuristic sci-fi thriller), wandered through the air-conditioned malls, and explored China town.
The first day there we headed out to the Bantu caves. The caves are 276 steps up into a mountain and have a shrine inside. They were an amazing sight, though for some people the monkeys running up and down the steps were obviously the main attraction. On the way back our taxi driver gave us his opinion of Malaysia. Doesn’t David Sedaris say taxi drivers are the best way to get to know a new place? I didn’t ask him what Malaysians believe about Santa Claus but I did gain some insight. Before the trip I knew essentially nothing about Malaysia except that the Petronas towers are the iconic symbol of Kuala Lumpur. Turns out Malaysia was a British colony (literally I knew NOTHING going into the trip). There are huge Indian and Chinese populations, but our taxi driver claimed even if your family had lived in Malaysia for generations, as his had, your Malaysian passport will still say “from India.” He also told us only those who are ethnic Malay can vote for the parliament seats, and unsurprisingly an ethnic Malay person has held control of the country since independence. I should probably do some research to back up these claims before throwing them around on my blog, but my internet is slow so for now I’ll take them at face value.
Christine and I took the overnight train from Kuala Lumpur to Langkawi, an island off the coast of northern Malaysia. The island was so lush and green, it was really beautiful. The weather didn’t exactly cooperate for us to partake in the activities the beach would normally offer, but we did explore the island. One day we rode a cable car up into the mountains and got a beautiful view of the island. All the way at the top it was so foggy we couldn’t see anything, but it was still cool to see the cable cars basically disappearing into the fog. Afterwards we hiked up a very steep hill to see the seven pool water fall. At the very top it was a fairly small stream, but it was still a very verdant and worthwhile site. On the way down we saw a view of the waterfall from below. Maybe the view wasn’t worth the crazy hike, but it was nice to see a wet, green landscape after months of dried up rice paddies.
We had one more day in Kuala Lumpur on the way back, where I was happy to take full advantage of the ridiculously nice breakfast buffet. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me. What can I say, food is a priority?
We then took our last flight, every single one of which was delayed (Air Asia is no RyanAir… they are not the most on time airline and they do not have a great jingle that plays everytime a flight lands on time), to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. The city wasn’t as totally cosmopolitan as Kuala Lumpur. It was more like a half way point between total modernization and being totally rural and undeveloped. I really enjoyed walking around the city, just seeing the wild difference between two major cities only a six hour bus ride from each other, Ho Chi Minh and Phnom Penh. The streets were clean, though they were packed with traffic, and everyone just appeared so much more modern in both dress and behavior. We saw all the major sites we could in one day including the old Post Office and Notre Dame cathedral, as well as the huge market. The hotel where we were staying had a great live band that played on the 23rd floor so we went up to watch them for our last night. It was so much fun and the band really appreciated us livening up the crowd of mostly people there on business.
It was a rude awakening to come back to Cambodia. Seeing other countries really opened my eyes to how rural and poor Cambodia is. Outside of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh the whole country is essentially wooden houses and motos. There is no public transport system, the roads are far worse than the rest of Southeast Asia, and the cities are dirtier. But at the same time I can appreciate that Cambodia has retained as much of its culture as possible. Even given its horrific recent past, I still feel Cambodians are proud and try to preserve the things about their country that are true and original. It is easy to get caught up in thinking that Cambodia is just so far behind, but there is a simple beauty to the country and the culture that you have to look hard to see. I hope that people who visit Southeast Asia get enough of a sense of the country to take that away, and not overlook the small miracles here in the face of the country’s major problems.