The English Teacher

Meet the Volunteer Teachers of  '11
Mel (Australia), John (UK), Kirsten (Australia), Donna (USA), Lily (USA), Henry (UK)

I was angry at first, but now it just makes me sad, and want to try harder.

It was my first day of teaching English to Lao students.  Miss Tuey was the classroom teacher - in her early twenties?  There were 17 students in the room, ranging from cheeky 8 year olds to studious 19s.  She greeted them in Lao, mentioned something about "Mr John".  I smiled, trying to hide my nerves, ready to sit to her side, observe, and think how I could best help her.

She handed me the open text book.  "You - teach - this - chap - ter," she instructed me.  And it was she that sat down.

I paused, an eyebrow raised.  "Er - well - how far have they got, what do they already know?" I murmered to her, as discreetly as I could in front of her pupils.  She looked at me, blank.

I had learnt my own first lesson.  She had hardly understood a word I had just said.  In this privately run college, the English speakers can't speak usable English, because the Lao State Education System hadn't taught them enough English in the first place.  Oh yes, they can write Future Simple Active/Passive on the board, above a table of verbs.  But discuss a lesson plan with her assistant?  Goodness, no.

My 60 classroom hours as an English teacher had begun.

John

Cambodia, Inside & Out

Mr Vey, our Tuc Tuc driver, not going far

The moment I said it, I wished I had not.

She was the most timid of hotel staff, meekly submitting the bill as we prepared to leave Cambodia.  Her English was poor, her features flat.  But she had asked me where we were going to next, and I wanted to encourage her English by keeping the conversation going.

"We - go - to - Laos", I smiled, anticipating our 50 minute flight to the neighbouring country.  "You have been there?"

The sadness of her smile was all the answer she needed to give.  Cambodian hotel staff don't go abroad.  I'm not sure many of them leave their city.  Just as the tuc tuc driver who'd served us loyally for three days never stepped into our hotel lobby when he picked us up.  I doubt he'd ever dared cross such an air-conditioned threshold in his life.

In South East Asia, as in Africa it seems, there are those who go, and those who stay; those who serve, and those who are served.

John

Henri et Jean en Cambodge

Henry spotted it in a souvenir shop.  A poster that echoed back to Cambodia's sixties heydey, when the Belgian schoolboy sleuth, Tintin, had an adventure here.  The poster showed the cartoon's cover, Tintin en Cambodge, the detective rummaging amongst the ruins of Angkor Wat.

It seemed apt.   We've cantered through Cambodia as if in some comic strip.  The fields have been saturated green, the palaces gilded with gold, the skies translucent blue.  People have smiled just a little too much, echoes of the Truman Show.  Animals in the meadows have looked a touch touched up.  The food was sublime, pre food-poisoning; menacing thereafter.

Yes, Cambodia is a curious spot.  If Tintin and Snowy had come bounding around the corner of the Silver Pagoda with a battalion of sticky rice pots in hot pursuit, I'd not have been too surprised.

John

What the Taxi Driver Told Us

We often like to ask taxi-drivers for tips on the best sights in their city.  A buzzing market perhaps, or a district that really hums.  But that's not what the taxi driver who drove us from Phnom Penh airport to our hotel had in mind when we sought his advice.

His name is Kim San, and he is about the same age as my older sister.  I calculated this because of what he breezily told us as we drove through the streets of Phnom Penh.  He himself had had a sister, and a brother too, but they both died of starvation during the regime under Pol Pot.  His father was executed.  His grandmother was forced to work in the rice-fields.  So he eagerly recommended that we pop along to the Museum of Genocide -- he'd take us there, tomorrow perhaps? -- and then follow it up with an afternoon outing to the Killing Fields.  We'd be able to see the tree where thousands of children's little lives had been smashed, watched by their parents as they awaited their turn.

A Killing Field

That evening, as we strolled along the river bank to our beer and our dinner, the smiles and laughter of the Cambodian people crowding around us proved to be the first mystery of this mystical country.  We suspect it will not be the last.

John

The Gulf

Mine's bigger than yours

There's something confected about Qatar, the bit of the Gulf that juts out above Saudi Arabia.  It's like a bag of cupcakes dropped in a piping hot building site.

The very generous friends who were hosting us took us for lunch at their club.  A beautiful spot, with a private beach and a pool, and a buffet to make the eyes water as well as the mouth.  The seafood lay on a bed of crushed ice, pink-perfect.  The roast beef sighed succulence.  The chocolate was melted into a waterfall, a silver tureen for a lake.  Our view?  Of skyscrapers, gleaming as if iced in vanilla, amidst the dust and craters of the not-quite-yet-built.

We'd dropped in because Qatar Airways were flying us from London to Bangkok, and this seemed a golden opportunity to see a part of the world we would never choose to visit.  Golden it was, and we're very glad we did.  We need benchmarks on this adventure.  The mud-huts of Uganda have, we hope, provided one.  Doha's soaring skyline has delivered, surely, the other.  A gulf indeed.

John