So this week I started teaching again after having five days off from school for Water Festival, which came at a timely moment as I was afraid I was beginning to sink into the depths of my bed with no hopes to ever again return to the outside world and be a productive member of society. On Mondays, I only teach two hours in the morning, which may be a good thing because it allows me to sort of ease back into a normal work week, or could be a bad thing because it lets me be lazy a little longer… I haven’t really decided yet. Monday I had a really bad class. Like, so bad that I almost walked out on them and started crying… I choked my way through the dialogue in the book anyway, my internal dialogue screaming at me to not let them see me upset, but they’re not stupid. They knew. And I didn’t recover… I was so upset that no one was participating; the majority of them don’t know how to read in English (after having studied English for several years already- being in grade ten- many of them still don’t know how to read in English). I felt incredibly frustrated with the whole Cambodian school system in general- the corruption, the favoritism, the unequal opportunity. It all hit me at once and I found myself wanting to run away, maybe even back to America.

Fortunately, I have made some really good friends here, and my friend Amie offered me words of wisdom and hope that helped me get through the morning, and eventually the rest of the day, with a smidgen more optimistic of an outlook. There are going to be really bad days here. I came here knowing that, yet it doesn’t make the reality of one any less real, scary, or disillusioning.

On Fridays, I teach another two hours. Tuesday through Thursday, I teach four hours straight through just FYI (I’m not totally lazy), with Khmer lessons and English club in the afternoon to boot. So this morning before class, my co-teacher Chun Saroon called me. (You might remember him from a previous entry). “Hello. Yes. Today, I am very busy.” So I taught the class, to a classroom full of tenth graders whose grasp of the English language is less than tenuous at best. There were times during the lesson when I had that same feeling of Holy shit I want to be anywhere but here- when forty pairs of glazed over eyes were staring at me, bored out of their skulls- but other times when I felt like Ok, I think I can do this. And this is pretty much how every class goes for me. There are moments when I feel ok about it all- when I made them laugh at something, or someone voluntarily raises their hand to answer a question- and moments I feel hopeless.

So ok, maybe there will be days when I hate this, resent my co-teachers, resent my students, resent myself for resenting them… But then, hopefully, there will be days when I think, Ok, I can do this.