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on Meg's Cambodian Adventures (Cambodia), 01/Dec/2008 02:23, 34 days ago
Life in the Mountains& Jungle…..I have now been living in Sen Monorom in Mondulkiri for nearly three weeks. It takes 8 hours in a scary pick up truck up sliding muddy‘roads’ to get to this isolated little haven in the middle of nowhere. It is an incredibly pretty province surrounded by jungle, rivers, waterfalls and mountains that remind me of the Drakensberg in South Africa- so immediately felt quite at home! I am living in a pretty wooden house on the edgeof a lake, which means I have stunning views from all my windows and am getting used to living alone ( with the mouse, 2 small ghekos and a big gheko which reminds me of a crocodile!). When we arrived the weather was very hot, but a lot cooler than the rest of Cambodia but now the weather has takenan unexpected (for me) turn and although it can still get pretty hot in the day, the nights are freezing, and since I didn’t think Cambodia had a winter I was very ill prepared! Still, I have begged, stolen and borrowed some jumpers, 3 blankets and a hot water bottle and now I can just about bearit! The fact that my house is wooden means some of the cold wind rushes in in gaps through the planks- but im told the winter is short! In the mornings I am woken up by the landlords roosters, ducks and chickens at 5am. In Cambodia , most of the houses do not have hot water, so its cold showers allround- if you have a shower- which I don’t! So showering consists of throwing buckets of icy water on your head, which can be improved by boiling some water first. But in my case….. the bathroom walls and ceiling aren’t attached which means when its windy, the wind gushes through making it the worst shower experience ever! …. so all in all I am eagerly awaiting the return of summer! But I cant complain, Sen monorom only got electricity a week before we arrived, so I think I timed it just right! There are no grocery shops etc… here so everything is bought at the market, but there isnot a huge amount there, so most VSOs save up to trek back to Phnom Penh once every 6 weeks to stock up on necessities! One thing about living here is that everyday activities take a lot longer…. going to the market to buy ice for the icebox every two days because we don’t have fridges, handwashing all our clothes etc…. but I think we’re all getting used to it! We also have a pretty good social life here though, not by Brighton standards, but by Cambodian standards! There are quite a few NGOs working in the district which means there are about 25 europeans based here and from what I can tell there is at least one party a week to go to, there is also a great bamboo bar called the greenhouse which is very pretty and a few good restaurants and retreat-type places. Its great!I will be working with schools in the Senmonorom district of Mondulkiri. The work I do in each schools will be different. The first school I am working in is PuLoung, which has an amazing enthusiastic school director who has built a playground, managed to get water filters for each classroom, has toilets that are clean and work! It is an amazing school and very advanced compared to many others, so we will be working on recycling initiatives, a vegetable patch (so that kids can sell the produce) as well as learning games and teaching methodology. In other schools, hygiene may be the most important issue, since many don’t even have toilets or running water, or have very badly maintained toilets. And in other schools it will mainly be teaching methodologies and working towards child-friendly schools. I do think the schools here are amazing for what they are given. Most teachers only get paid $30 per month and oneschool in my district only has the school director as a teacher- this means he is teaching all grades, all day, alone. Others have multi-grade classes whereby grade 3 sits facing one wall, grade 4 faces the other way and the teacher somehow manages to teach them all. The kids are incredibly well behaved- I really don’t see multi-grade teaching working in the UK ! The majority of kids here are from the minority tribe, Pnong, but instruction is in Khmer, a language many of them don’t speak…. so there are plenty of barriers to education here and I think I have my work cut out for me!