We were picked up at 8 am this morning, along with Garrett, to go to Piek Snaeng Chas. Today’s focus was to get them to completely understand the questions, as well as the answers so that it’s more of a call and response. To do this, after the hello song, we split the whole class into two and put each group at one end of the room. One group then asked the questions while the other shouted the reply and then we swapped. It meant that those who still didn’t really know it beforehand were able to join in with their friends and have fun while learning it at the same time. We then moved on to the game ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’ just to go over their counting.
Once we’d done a fair few rounds of these 2 games, we split them in to groups again. This time Garrett took 4 or 5 of the older ones who speak pretty good English, or who at least pick it up really well. They did questions such as ‘would you like a book or a ball?’ and then answered with each other. Philippa used Spot the Dog (a hand puppet) to go over the questions and answers with a group of the younger ones. They picked it up amazingly by the end, and so also went over counting as well.
Chloe and I were also going over the questions and answers, which the children can now do! We ended the hour by doing the hokey kokey and our version of duck duck goose which is always very funny.
After lunch, we got picked up at 1:30 to go to Svay Sisophon. On the way we stopped off at the lonely tree which holds importance in the church here although I’m not too sure why. It is a tree that stands by itself, hence it’s name, and so we pulled over to have a look and a photo.
Our main reason we went to to Svay Sisophon was to visit the student centre there which is run by Fr. Greg. To introduce us, one of the volunteers there did a presentation about the centre and also some of communities they are helping. Fr. Greg then took us to go visit the new Jesuit school which is called Xavier Jesuit School, which, at the moment has 2 kindergarten classes, of around 30 students each, and 3 English classes. Most of the teachers are paid volunteers, who are staying for around 1 year or so. They’re currently working on building a primary, middle school, high school and a multi-purpose building.
We left the school to go visit a small village called Bong Ro that was built by the church and is also being helped through classes on things such as hygiene and basic Khmer. Looking round the small village was lovely to meet some of the people there and the children loved swinging on the truck as well! Someone was telling us that one of the houses don’t use their upstairs at all because they don’t want their wooden staircase to rot which was rather strange as it meant that they had a whole free room upstairs for nothing. Everyone was very welcoming, as they have been everywhere we go in Cambodia, but after a quick visit we had to get back to the student centre for mass at 6:30.
They have English mass every Thursday and Khmer mass every Monday for the students and staff, so we could actually understand and join in today which is a nice change. There are about 30 students who live at the centre and they all stay there because their homes are too far away from the school. The centre gives them a home as well as a place to study and they also have some extra classes there too. It is very common in Cambodia for the teachers not to teach at a very high standard during the day so that the students who want to do well have to pay for extra lessons with them after school. This is why there are so many catch up classes.
Dinner was after mass. We ate with the students, who were all very lovely and had good English as well. Most of the students I spoke to were high school age from around 16-18 years old, so around our age which was nice.We had some really good conversations with them and enjoyed our visit a lot.
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