KIDTEA School : two weeks of teaching and living

We arrive on Monday, the 6th of June, around 2pm. Welcomed by Sophara, the director, we see our room for the first time to drop our bags.

It's a tiny room with two mattresses on the floor bellow a mosquito net. We highly understand the importance of the net when we realize that there's no window behind the curtain but a big hole in the wall. I instantly try to figure out how many kinds of insects will visit us at night.

We sit then in a class to observe a Khmer teacher and her ten years old pupils.

We tell to ourselves that teaching English to young Cambodian children gonna be a holy adventure !

We have quickly the occasion to experience it as we have to teach our first class later in the afternoon, from 5.10 to 6.10 pm.

Our students are already teenagers, they are mostly 15, but some are older, up to 20. The hour ends fast and we can't wait to meet our other classes of the morning and afternoon, way younger.

After 6 pm, when all the children left, we drink some beers and eat what the directors's mother prepared us.

The first night is not really peaceful as I'm stressed about being bothered by insects. From 5 am the first kids arrive at the school and loudly play in front of our room, waiting for 8 am. The alarm rings at 6.45 pm, tired, we take our shower and are told by Sophara that we teach in another part of the school. We take a scooter and drive there something like 5 minutes.

We know this school as we stopped there while searching for the volunteering with our tuk tuk few days earlier.

Our morning class is waiting for us with a young Khmer teacher. There's two classes, Tobias and me take care of one alone. We have to learn them the different fruits in English. The process is quite simple. You write the vocabulary on the board, make them repeat, then they have to copy and repeat again and again. One they pronounce it well, you pick some that they write the words at the board by themselves.

The second hour consists in a big game called "Find the word". Tobias and me write all the words on the board in a purposed messy way. The children split up in two teams. Turn by turn, one from each team come to the board and the first who points the word we are saying, wins.

On this first day I couldn't know how much I will miss doing this game.

When the class ends, at 10 am, we drive back to the main school to rest and eat.

At 2 pm it's time to teach our afternoon class in the other school for 2 hours. They are younger than the morning and less numerous. We teach them the different insects in the same way we did on the morning for fruits.

From the first day we fell in love with this group.

At 5.10 we teach again the older class we already had on Monday.

This is how it goes.

Sometimes, by the evening, we take a tuk tuk or drive the scooter to Siem Reap. We need to breathe far from the school and feel the city again.

As the school is located outside Siem Reap, in Trang Village, we can't walk to the city center. The scooter is our freedom and Tobias gets used to the Cambodian traffic easily.

On the week end we book a room in an hotel downtown, the Visoth Boutique. For 10$ per night (low season) this is the best comfort we have since we left Europe. After a week spent on the floor, surrounded by bugs, this clean and quiet room with a huge bed, air con and a TV, is a miracle.

We take the time to think about our trip during the week end and finally decide to teach only for one week more and leave earlier to Laos.