General Update and Library Happenings

Hello! I realize it’s been a while since I last posted, so I’ll relay the top five highlights of what I’ve been up to in the meantime:

1) I went to some friends’ Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World: a leadership camp that emphasizes empowering young Khmer women) in Kampong Cham, the province just north of me. We used a stencil to spray-paint shirts (Note: it is extremely difficult to keep black spray paint in one place. More often than not you will end up with gummy fingerprints all over the shirt.)

2) I helped a friend move in Phnom Penh. Despite looking like my legs are being crushed by these trunks, I was actually fairly comfortable.

3) I cooked lentil burgers, sweet potato chips, and lemonade in honor of 'Merica day

(Do you love your country as much as this girl does right now? I doubt it)

4) I ate brie from a wheel twice the size of my head while looking extremely awkward and out of place at a fancy Embassy event I never should have been allowed into

5) I took advantage of this excessively large bathroom to tap dance.

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...And that brings us to the present! After my library project’s initial burst of productivity things hit a brick wall. My school director asked me to wait to start the project until students had returned the books they’d borrowed over the course of the year. This meant not starting the project until after school was out, when students would be busy with private classes and/or helping their families at home, so I decided to give out a survey during the final weeks of school to gauge student interest and availability.

This proved futile for two reasons: first, because at that time students still didn’t know when they’d have free time (private class schedules had yet to be determined), and second, because I told them the wrong start date for the project. Heh. I told everyone I talked to we would begin working in earnest on July 2^nd, all the while forgetting I’d been invited to sing at an Embassy event for the 4th of July and would have to be in Phnom Penh on that date. So I sheepishly called my school director to ask if he could please mitigate my mistake during the morning announcements. At this point I was pretty sure no one was going to show up to help the spazzy foreigner teacher, but my students surprised me...

Four students were waiting for me when I came to the school on the day we agreed to start on. I asked them to write down a few of their thoughts on the map project (Do you think this a good idea? Do you think it is important to know where other countries in the world are? How can we see if we have learned more about geography than we knew before doing this project?)

They filled in a blank map with the countries they could name without looking.

One or two students took the reigns on the labeling, but most of them contributed

They identified about 30 countries. Some of them were labeled incorrectly or spelled wrong but I was impressed with how many they could name (world geography is not emphasized in Cambodian schools). We’ll do this exercise again after the map is completed and hopefully they’ll know a lot more than they do now.

Before painting.

We measured our space, taped it off, and lay down the base of ocean blue. The coordinates for any World Map Project are double the length as the height. Ours is 140 cm high by 280 cm wide.

The fruits of our labor: a (not-so) perfectly squared rectangle, in all its shining glory. I actually got a swell of pride when I came back to the school the morning after we’d completed this to do some touch-ups. Just a rectangle, yes, but my rectangle!

My boc or Khmer host dad (far right) has shown up multiple times to help. His curiosity was likely piqued when he first saw me rushing to the school, huffing and puffing down the stairs carrying and almost dropping a tub of paint, a yard-stick, rollers, and pencils, looking utterly confused and mumbling about having napped too long. My boc is a bit of an imposing character (the first day he showed up he stood on the margins with his arms folded, pointing out to the students what they were doing wrong), but it’s also been nice having him around to spot things I might otherwise overlook (he saved the horizontal lines of the grid from going all wonky, for example).

...And that's the news for now! In the coming days I'll sketch the vertical lines of the grid, and then start sketching individual countries. Send good thoughts my way that students continue to show up to help! Thanks for tuning in, and for your support.