We got a Tuk Tuk through the town with a couple of other volunteers who have already been there 2 weeks. There are 3 classrooms. The first is in a little courtyard, where the schools offices are. Apart from teaching the children here, the organisers also get jobs for the children's parents so that they don't take their children out of school to work on the streets. One office was filled with mothers of the children who were selling strings of beads that they have made from paper. The organisation buys them from them, then sells them on to places all round the world. they also give the families rice, so they don't have to worry so much about feeding the family, again so the children can stay in school.
The classroom is an area with a roof but no walls, just screens, and the children sit in tiny little wooden school chairs, the kind we had a school 30 years ago...they probably are the same ones, passed on when we no longer needed them and got better ones.... only a few months ago they just had to sit on the floor.
The children look about 3 or 4, but they are in fact around 7 years old. They are just so utterly lovely and greeted us straight away with "hello teacher" and with the traditional hands-together in prayer like manner.
We are given our timetables. We teach English to the older children in the mornings from 7.30 - 9am and then we recap, practise and get the children to type what they have learnt into computers from 9.30 to 10.30. We have to come up with our own lesson plans based on what what they have already been taught, which we know from notes left by other volunteers.
In the afternoon we teach different things on different days. Drawing, Arts and crafts, Singing and drawing (?) , Alphabet and numbers, Sports and games
Panic set in. How can i do this? - I have no idea how i can teach these children even half as well as they deserve. What if I am rubbish? I will just let them down. I want to go home and hide. I start thinking of how I am going to tell Kimlay I can't do this.
The next classroom is down a back street, and about the same size as a one car garage, open to the street. About 20 children are taught in here, at chairs and desks crammed together with no space in between. They decorate the concrete walls with little pictures of things they have made in class.
I am trying to tell myself that I've done jobs in the past I hated and I just got on and did them but I still want to run away. The last class room is a 10 min walk away. It's nicer and even has fans, and the children again are so sweet and polite and so genuinely pleased that we are there. Mothers come and talk to us in Khmer. Kimlay translates. They are thanking us for coming and giving them our time, and teaching their children. They say this is a generous and precious gift we are giving their children; that this is the future of the country.
I say to Geraldine we need to go back and plan our lessons.
We sit down and plan the first week and it wasn't as hard as I'd thought. I think I can do this.
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