Turning 60 in Cambodia

This week I turned 60.  I write that and don't quite know what to do with that number.  So, I thought I'd just throw it out there at the beginning of this blog entry and see where it leads.  Like the placement I have in Cambodia, there is a bright side, and a, how to say in English? A not so bright, or rather, a challenging side.  Yes, a challenging side.

 I want to report that at last I have some routines, some semblance of a schedule, some actual teaching, some actual teacher training to conduct and curriculum development to do. This didn't come easy:  I have had to fight and scramble for everything I do here.  I know some of my colleagues that I have communicated with, English Language Fellows in Vietnam, Thailand and other parts of Cambodia, are overly busy, and would gladly take my adhoc schedule, but here in the provinces, it has been a "create work" sort of structure.  I feel a bit like a salesman with one product to sell, that product being me as an English language fellow, someone who has experience with teaching English, and having to "cold call" clients based on some list provided by the US Embassy, with the idea that they would be interested in my services.  My theatre friends will know it's like the David Mamet play: "Glengarry Glenn Ross", a vicious work about salesmen trying to make a living, based on some unclear leads.  Well the sales pitch is finally working.   This is the bright side of the placement.  I have managed to get some work out in the provinces: last week I was invited to a small rural high school in Kampot Province, about 5 hours south of my home in Kampong Cham.  There I went, at the request of a Peace Corps volunteer, to conduct a workshop for English Teachers at her school, on how I use drama to teach English.  After observing classes in the morning and hearing one 7th grade English teacher ask: "how do I get kids to remember the vocabulary I teach them?”  I decided to focus on using physical techniques to learn and reinforce vocabulary. In the photo below we can see Khmer teachers, creating a 3-person tableau, or frozen picture, representing their interpretation of the word "Haunted":

The teachers were engaged, had fun, and I hope were inspired to add this type of activity to their repertoire of vocabulary teaching strategies.  Next week I am, after multiple emails, going to show up at a school in Ratanakiri province, a corner of rural North Eastern Cambodia, and will do something similar.  After that it is a full week of conduction training for 1st year Peace Corps Volunteers in Phnom Penh.

Like I said these experiences are the bright side--I am meeting teachers very interested in some alternative approaches to teaching English.  Oh, the sixty thing. The bright side: here in Cambodia it is definitely to my advantage.  In the US, it seems, young teachers look at older teachers with a bit of an attitude that implies, " We do things differently now, old-timer, step out of the way".  Plus age is a bit hidden there, no one comes right out and asks: how old are you?  Here it's the third question you get when meeting a Cambodian.  First, What's your name?  Then, How do you like Cambodia?  Then, How old are you?  My understanding is in Khmer culture, how they refer to you, what pronoun to use, what to call you, is based on age.  So they need to know.  And when asked how many years I have been teaching, after I say 35 years, the reaction here, unlike the "get outta my way old timer", reaction in the US, is, "wow you have lots of experience, tell me what you know".  So, if you gotta turn 60 somewhere, Cambodia is a good place to do it.

But let's talk a bit about the dark side.  Not of turning 60.  I don't know it yet; it's only been a few days. I'm sure it will rear it's ugly head soon enough.   No, of the placement.   The things that follow are not intended to be a commentary but a reporting, in the spirit of moving to understanding. The most general way of saying it is I have no regular teaching duties or co-teaching duties here, except what I have managed to fight for.  No one from the institution has communicated any need or even more discouraging, they have communicated no want.  At times it is as if they don't know what to do with the  ELF program. The US Embassy suggested I find a teacher to co-teach with.  So, I did, but the teacher never shows up to class.  I am told by Peace Corp Volunteers that this is, unfortunately a regular pattern here at the Regional Teacher Training Center, where some teachers will never, or rarely, make an appearance in the class.  And, because of the communication style, it is all underplayed and not spoken of.  So, I have taken on this methodology class, which was missing a teacher, teaching the students, who will be English teachers in Cambodian grades 7-9 next year, the methodology necessary to being an English teacher specifically, but also a good teacher in general.  Here is the bright side:  these young people are hungry for interesting,  more student centered, methodology.  And it has been one of the great pleasures of my teaching career to share what I know with them.  They have little experience with it as students themselves.  I have spent the past month visiting classes in local secondary schools and I have never witnessed as much teacher centered teaching in my life.  No open ended questions, no group work, task based learning, partner talk-- none of the TESOL techniques we all know and swear by.  No formative assessments, no student is held accountable for his or her learning except through monthly exams. No scaffolding for less proficient students, no gradual release of responsibility, nothing that tells students their learning is important and I as a teacher will do whatever it takes to help you understand.  All of the instruction I have witnessed has been of rote learning--teacher speaks, class repeats, individuals repeat, next phrase.  In classrooms with 40-60 students, no air-conditioning in 95 degree heat, this seems like a deadly mix that leads Cambodia to be the 69th out of 70 countries (only Libya was lower) on English language proficiency http://m.phnompenhpost.com/national/english-skills-lagging-behind-global-trend.

Bright side?  The young people who will be the next generation of teachers are hungry for information.  The difficulty?  Finding ways within the restrictions of the placement to provide it.  Rather than despair and think I have done little in my 2 1/2 months here I will make a list of what have I done.   

1. Started an English through Drama club--27 students came to an inaugural meeting last Thursday evening.

2.  Teaching a methodology class in place of a teacher who regularly is absent

3.  Teaching a practicum for a class that also had no teacher (a note the teacher showed up today, and she was by far the most communicative, and most experienced teacher I have met here--but she will be going on maternity leave at the end of January--but hopefully we can do some real co-teaching until then!)

4.  Developing workshops for teachers in distant provinces

5.  Doing periodic presentations at the local American Corners run by the US Embassy

6.  Outreach to local public schools--to visit and discuss English Teaching

7.  Played my bass with some local high school and college student for a performance they did in a fundraiser organized by local Peace Corp Volunteers

8.  Giving my business card to everyone that might have some need of an English language fellow with the hopes of developing a relationship that can turn into a project.

9.  Read everything I could about Cambodian education system and politics to help me see everything in a context of political/historical and economic reality.
10.  Collaborating with Phnom Penh based ELF, Kim, to conduct trainings for first year Peace Corps Volunteers in February.

11.  Scoured my own teaching library/materials and internet and the COP of the fellowship for techniques, strategies and theory I can share with my students.

When I look at this, I feel a bit better knowing I have done some things here.  In a nutshell, the lack of clarity from my host institution is turning out positive for me, as it is forcing me to recognize what I can offer and seek out ways of making things happen.  Instead of being given a schedule of classes and a curriculum, this is much, much more what a sabbatical from Middle School teaching in the US should like like.  Hopefully, turning 60, while posing it's challenges, will also be an age of possibilities and opportunities as well.

The importance of listening

My morning run takes me to the river.  Not just any river mind you, but the Mekong, which flows through or creates the border in many countries in South East Asia—China, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and of course Cambodia. We walk to it in the early evening as well, when the riverside is filled with families, street food and boats.  This photo is of last night, a near full moon, and a ferry filled with motos, ready to cross to a nearby island. 

On my run this morning I saw kids: on bicycle, on their parents scooters, sometimes 4 young kids to a scooter (they were maybe ten years old, driving a scooter, helmet less--cute or reckless, you decide) all going to school.  Public school hasn’t started yet but there are scores of private schools in even the poorest provinces.  I could write a book on the reasons for this, and perhaps I will explore the question on why people with very little money will put their kids in private schools (I encountered the same thing in Mexico) in the future but I’m not going to explore that in this entry.  Instead I want to talk about listening.

Just seeing these kids made me think about my own teaching and also got me thinking about the relationship of that to my own experiences in Cambodia this past month.   Today marks my one month anniversary here, and although I have yet to set foot in a classroom, I have learned a lot.  I have learned a lot because while waiting for my project to start I spend much of my day listening.  I am in the receptive stage of Khmer language production, which means I have a few vocabulary words, and a few pieces of grammar to stick 'em together, but I can’t get the utterances out fast enough, and lack the confidence to speak.  So I listen: I listen in the markets, I listen in the streets, and I listen to my neighbors.

But I’m not only listening to Khmer.  I am listening to English, accented by French, German, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Australian among others.  Kampong Cham has a small ex-pat community, mostly NGO workers, and a few involved in some form of desperate private enterprise that I can’t quite figure out.  These folks tend to congregate at a few waterfront restaurants and bars that cater to this crowd.  When I go, and talk to them,  I notice that some are good listeners, and some are good talkers, and unfortunately, rarely does a person exhibit both qualities.  I have met some people that never ask questions, but rather use conversation as a platform for their own ideas, opinions, and ramblings about their projects, their world-view, and themselves.  In thinking about language teaching these people remind me of the most valuable lesson about teaching in general and teaching language in particular that I hope to impart on my students (future teachers):  students should be speaking about 70% of the time in a classroom.  Not idle conversation, but conversation about things important to them, with the structured guidance of a teacher.  A good teacher asks questions, and then gives time and creates an environment in which students answer and construct meaning out of their responses, and listens to their students to assess their progress.  A poor teacher is one who speaks most of the time, barely leaving room for their students to participate and learn, and therefore has nothing to listen to, and can only assess a students progress through tests.  Witnessing these ex pats that talk and talk and talk and feeling my frustration at not having a chance to participate, has been the best preparation I could have for my own teaching, by noting their omission of listening.  So, I urge myself to not fall into the trap of only talking about my project, and myself, when around these folks, but rather to ask questions, and listen.  Sometimes the best lessons are right in front of us.

The power of stories

     I am in a bit of limbo, waiting for my fellowship to actually start.  But perhaps I am thinking too narrowly about what the fellowship is.  When say I am waiting I mean my actual teaching hasn't begun.  The institutions that I am assigned to, The Regional Teacher Training Institute (which trains future secondary teachers) and the Provincial Teacher Training Center (which trains future elementary school teachers) in Kampong Cham, Cambodia are on vacation until November.  No students, no classes, and no other trainers to really talk to about plans/schedule, or actually anything.  I have moments of serious confusion, followed by the elation of not having to go to work, and just trying to figure out life in Cambodia.  But maybe that's as it is supposed to be, because I know that for this fellowship to work I have to know Cambodia.  It would be impossible to teach Cambodian students about how to be a teacher without knowing something about their country and the culture they are from. It is not an easy place to know.  I am in a small provincial town on the Mekong River about 125 km from the capital Phnom Penh.  But it could be 1,000 miles as to how different it seems to me. Phnom Penh feels somehow familiar, something like New York City, my hometown, in the 70s.  I half expected to see a young Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle driving a tuk tuk through the mean streets, garbage and poverty ridden, wet with Monsoon rains, looking for trouble.  Not so Kampong Cham province. Not that it is not garbage ridden or poor.  For that it most certainly is.  But it is different in deeper ways. The streets are safe, even late at night when almost no one is about, and one isn't told to hold onto your iPhone for dear life, or watch your cash.  And there is almost an American Graffiti type moment every friday night as teenagers, often three to a motorbike, cruise along the road right by the river, back and forth, talking on their cell phones and flirting.  Also English is very seldom used here, unlike Phnom Penh and Siem Reap and the tourist areas of the Cambodian coast. So I wander the markets, trying to use my rudimentary Khmer and exaggerated gestures (thank goodness for theatre training) to make simple purchases.  I rented a motor bike and cruise the town and the countryside, watching kids walking their cows, yelling "Hello, Hello" as we go by and seeing wooden houses raised high on stilts to stay out of harms way of the rising river, with hammocks and fires underneath.  

So while waiting Laura and I took a bus across the country to Siem Reap to see the temples of the ancient Angkor civilization.  And that town, despite being surrounded by this magnificent ancient history, was a mash-up of different cultures, including western.  There is even a street called "pub street" where young western and Asian tourists gather to drink.  Didn't like it too much in that neighborhood but the ruins got me thinking.  About a lot of things, but mostly stories.

The ruins themselves were fascinating, and I expected that from having seen great photos of Angkor Wat and Bayon in National Geographic and other venues.  But what really struck me were the bas reliefs--intricate carvings of elaborate scenes from epic stories. At Angkor Wat the scenes were mostly of the Mahabarata, the epic Hindu tale, and included a scene from the Ancient legend of the Churning of the  Sea of Milk, the Hindu creation myth.  You could spend hours gazing at this relief as it expanded an entire hallway 49 meters, and each centimeter worthy of an hour of close inspection.   Then there was the temple of Banteay Srei, which they say means "Citadel of Women" and the reliefs there were richer still, taken from the other Hindu epic tale of renown:  the Ramayana--one relief of the battle of the Monkey Kings was nothing short of a narrative throw down.  It was so richly realized that despite all the tourists snapping photos and chatting away I could hear monkeys and drums and chants rising from the pink sandstone walls. And I could hear the storyteller's voice ringing--"Once there was..."
The stories that were built into the life of these temples, and thus the life of the culture,  were some of the most complex narratives ever created by humans.  

This is part of the fabric of Khmer culture and one that I am searching to find in it's contemporary manifestation.  It isn't at the surface of modern Khmer culture the way Irish legends are bubbling from the mouths of every Irish person I have ever met.  And maybe I am searching too hard for a narrative thread, but I can't help but wonder what I would've thought of Khmer society before the Khmer Rouge gouged out its eyes and soul.  Where is the music, the art, the dance?  It's not apparent to me other than in tourist meccas.  It saddens me to know that a generation of the daily practitioners of that part of culture were all killed or left the country, or submerged their art in order to survive. 

I think of these connections because by day I wander the streets and markets and villages and by night I read.  I came across this last night in a magnificent book given to me by a local peace corps volunteer, a book about how modern Cambodia came to be.--Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio.  In the chapter about the Khmer Rogue years appears this:

          Of the 72 men then imprisoned at Kach Roteh, he was the only one who
          survived. After his arrival, he slowly won over the young guards by telling
          them stories—Aesop’s fables and Asian folktales he had learned by heart
          from the old tapes he once played over the radio. One morning, when the
         prisoners were assembled in the yard, one of Kassie’s teenage guards
         walked up and pulled him out of the line and shackled another man in his
         place. Shortly afterward the prisoners were marched off and killed. “I was
         needed to tell the stories,” Kassie said. “But somebody had to die in my
         place, which is not a good feeling.”

A modern and even more ghastly version of the Scheherazade story from 1001 nights.  And this made me think of the power of stories and why the ancient temples are so enduring, because they have good stories to tell.   And it made me think of how a human being survived because he had a story to tell.  So I listen for stories and I am wondering, if I ever learn enough Khmer to actually listen to people in the hammocks underneath their simple homes;  listen to the women in the markets selling chickens and food I have no clue as to what it is, will I understand the story of Cambodia a little more? For without stories it is, as Hamlet said, only "Words, words, words".  

Thinking about Cambodia part II (Please read part I if you haven't already)

It was early May and I had accepted the posting in Cambodia.  I had just a few days to take care of some preliminary vaccinations that the State dept. required for all postings.  Tetanus, TB clearance, polio etc.  The specific ones for Cambodia: Typhoid, Hep A/B, etc. would come later.  I went to the Kaiser health service in Oakland, California to get my immunizations.  When the woman who was helping me was getting my polio vaccine ready she unwrapped the needle and said: "Why do you need polio?"  She had my birthdate and knew that, being born in the 50s, meant that I had been vaccinated as a child.  I told her I didn't have any of my childhood records and that I needed it for this position to teach English in Cambodia.  She smiled and said, "I'm from Cambodia".  I looked more closely at her and saw she was probably near my age which would put her at the age of 20 or so when the Khmer Rouge came to power in April of 1975.  I did a delicate test by asking when she came to the United States.  "1979".  I said, something like "oh, you saw it all, didn't you?"and I already could feel this trepidation and empty feeling welling deep inside me that I continue to feel every time I see an older person here in Cambodia, a combination of compassion, admiration, fear and sadness that I never have felt before. She stopped, the needle naked and poised above my arm, and looked somewhere far away and then back to me.  "I saw my son killed.  My husband was tortured and killed.  I woke up everyday touching myself to see if I was really there.  If I was still alive.  Everyday until I got out with my sister."  And then the tears, both of us, hers controlled, but deep, and mine, well, not so controlled, the tears dropping onto my shirt.  "I'm sorry I brought it back", I said.  She said, "No.  I haven't cried in a long time.  No one around here asks.  I've worked here for 15 years and no one has asked."  "You sure you can still do the shot?"  I asked, noticing the needle.  This one would hurt I thought, you don't want a crying nurse giving you a shot.  "Of course", she said, and the needle went in, and I hardly noticed.

 I continued to go back to her over the summer, about 4 times, to get a variety of vaccines needed for the trip.  And there was always a lot of conversation. She'd tell her fellow nurses, "He's going to my country." It turns out her home town, Kampong Cham, is where I will be spending much of this placement.  We have exchanged emails and she is coming here in October, and will introduce to me some of her family that survived.

I think now that story is the reason I came to Cambodia.  Cambodia is in my own backyard in Oakland, with many people with stories like Leang's.  Cambodians, Laotians, Burmese, Somali, Yeminis, etc.  all with stories and no one asks.  I think I'm here to learn how to ask.  And then to listen.

Thinking about Cambodia

These next thoughts will be split up into several postings--indulge me as I work through the answer to the question that so many of you and others asked me:  Why Cambodia?

I am sitting in a hotel right now, in Phnom Penh, waiting out an afternoon Monsoon.  I was thinking about what brought me to this fellowship year in Cambodia (jet lag has a way of keeping your mind whirling about while your body tries, and fails, at every attempt to really rest).  What I kept on coming back to was how I never really imagined that this would be the country I would end up in.  When I applied for this program I imagined South or Central America first.  Perhaps Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, or Peru.  Places I could finally achieve a real level of fluency in Spanish, places where my wife, Laura, could imagine herself living.  Tango in Argentina?  Why not?  Or maybe Turkey, which I enjoyed so much during a Fulbright -Hays program for teachers 5 years ago.  Or Morocco, Algeria.  Places to study Arabic language and music.  Lots of places, but not Cambodia.   

Why not Cambodia?  When I was matched to this project I initially turned it down.  Maybe it's my generation, but all I could think of was Nixon's illegal bombing and invasion of that country, which was followed by civil war, and then the ghastly genocide of the Khmer Rouge.  And the painful rebuilding of a country devastated by this weight of history.  No way I would want to live there.   Plus the heat of the jungle...  could I even survive it?  But I spent a weekend reevaluating this hasty decision.  Why was I applying for this fellowship?  Certainly there was the desire to travel, to live in a different culture for a year and really experience it.  Then there was the desire to simply mix things up.  I was turning 60.  My wife already turned 60.  It would be easy to continue things as they were, continue to teach drama and ESL in the public middle school I have called home for 25 years.  So maybe I needed to move out of my comfort zone a little to really mix it up. But Cambodia?  It was my 26-year-old daughter who changed my thinking.  She said something along the lines of "Perhaps you got placed in Cambodia because that's where you need to be.  You probably will travel to all the other places you want to go at some time, but you will never go to Cambodia.  I'd go there if I were you.  It's only a year."  And that made me think differently about this possibility and rather than resist it, accept it and learn from it, perhaps learning something I didn't expect. What that will be I am not entirely sure of, but for my next posting I want to write a short anecdote about something that happened in Oakland, California soon after accepting the fellowship in Kampong Cham, that I think captures the essence of this quest. I leave you today with two photos I took at the central market here in Phnom Penh, where we met a Cambodian woman from California, who left here at the age of 8 after she survived the Pol Pot regime, and who shared with us her bag of silkworms (to eat-- not bad, crunchy and clean) and left us with hugs and tears and promises to meet again.  We've had a lot of that (hugs and tears) in only two days.  And maybe that's why Cambodia.

Preparing for English Language Fellowship in Cambodia

 

School started up this week in Berkeley, but because of my sabbatical and waiting for my plane tickets from the state dept. for Cambodia, I’m not teaching.  So instead I took a mid morning run and found myself on the UC Berkeley campus and saw this tree.  It is the tree we used to sit under during breaks from my teaching credential program there back in 1979.  I didn’t learn how to teach that year, and still am learning how, but I did make some lasting relationships.  A bit of nostalgia as this is the first year since then, so that would make it 36 years, that I haven’t been in a classroom at this time of year.  I don’t mind at all.  But it seems like a long way from this tree to whatever tree I soon find myself under in Kampong Cham, in the shade along the Mekong River, escaping the heat of the jungle, waiting for my afternoon classes to begin.  This tree is where my journey as an educator began in the late summer of 1979.  Education has changed, but the tree hasn't.  Although the green grass that had surrounded it is gone, torn out due to the ongoing drought in California.