...it’s done. At least, I feel now like I’m at the end of something big, even though it’s exactly two months to the day until I get home. But one job is done.
Today was our last day in Tackok Charai, and so me and Vera’s last day of teaching together. The fact still hasn’t quite hit home. I don’t think it will for a while. I am suffering from mixed emotions; a kind of light relief, but also a deep nostalgia and pride at having made it this far. We did it!! It may not seem like the achievement was that great, considering the amount of free time we had, and considering the beautiful setting we were placed in, but the emotional roller-coaster of the last few months has been traumatic to say the least.
This week in itself was one of highs and lows. Our main plan for the week was to make papier mache animals out of balloons. This was a plan that we made at the very start of our time at Tackok Charai. Sat at the dining room table before this week began, Vera and I looked over our plan. I think my exact words were “Hah! Papier mache - yeah, that’s not going to work!” Bella, sat at the other end of the table, understandably shot me down, saying that we should try, that we could make it work, and other encouraging things. So Vera and I set about figuring out how to make it happen. We made a little papier mache balloon pig ready to show the kids which, despite Vera’s artistic speculation, ended up being very cute. It even had a little, unpainted, newspaper bum, to show the kids how the process worked. At 5am on Tuesday morning we were up and ready to be driven to the school in time for 7am lessons. We packed all our things onto the back of the 4x4 and when we reached the village we unloaded. To our horror, our wonderful piggy friend seemed to have fallen off the back of the van along the road, though it had left it’s badly stuck ears behind. So, we had to start from scratch with the children and hope they picked up the idea as we went along. It was one silly disaster after another. The first stage worked fine. Tuesday saw us out on the school decking with a ton of glue and paper and a lot of very happy, messy youngsters. In pairs, they all managed to coat their balloons in paper which we then left to dry in the sun. Bad idea! We had lunch and read in our hammocks for a couple of hours and re-emerged to a pile of deflated balloons covered with paper that in some cases had broken apart and in others had formed huge dents in their bodies. We repaired as much of the damage as we could, but the fact remained that each of the eighteen or so balloons needed a whole new layer. So, when the kids got to school the next day we got out the ingredients again. They were not impressed at having to repeat the previous day’s activities, no matter how exciting they had been first time round. But they repaired them nonetheless, and with a little extra effort from us afterwards, the balloons looked much happier. So we woke on Thursday morning excited to paint the animals, planning to give each pair of kids a different animal drawing to use as a model for their balloon. Still, the fates were against us. The teachers showed up at 7:30, looking way to pleased with themselves, to tell us, in staggered English, that they were leaving for the day and we had the kids to ourselves, a prospect that would have been very exciting had we had time to plan for it, but we hadn’t! So, we began with the only thing we had planned, which was painting the balloons. We had no time to draw our animal examples however, so instead we gave the balloons out and set about mixing the paint. While we were concentrating on this, the kids decided the delicate paper balloons would be better used as balls and hats, and then proceeded to get so over-excited by the paint that most of it ended up on the decking. It was a chaotic massacre which culminated in the survival of only 7 balloons, all painted in random mixtures of colour, and with the school decking looking much the same. We then spent the rest of the day in a staggered and exhausting attempt to engage the kids, who really didn’t seem to want to be engaged. It was just one of those days! We tried singing “heads, shoulders, knees and toes” which, whether because of my bad Khmer, or theirs (because most of the youngest kids were only just learning Khmer themselves), fizzled into nothing very fast. We also tried symmetry painting, which ended up with one of the classrooms getting a similar treatment to the decking. We eventually managed to engage them with a mixture of frisbee, dominoes and snap cards, but we were frustrated and exhausted by this point. Still, the kids seemed to be having a riot of time, literally! When all was quiet again, we manage to salvage the remains of our papier mache experiment and gave each paper thing eyes in a sad attempt at displaying the disaster which ended up being pleasing enough.
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| the little girls doing papier mache |
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| and the boys |
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| the halfway point |
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| the final product |
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| actually satisfyingly cheerful |
Thankfully, our final day was much more encouraging. It began with a night sleeping under the stars, we Vera and I decided to risk the cold and the morning dew for. The stars here are like nothing I've ever seen in Britain. In a fit of short, deep sleeping and sudden waking I saw more versions of the night sky than I ever considered existed, seeing different colours and constellations every time I opened my eyes. It was possibly the most satisfying, if the coldest, night of sleep and we both woke with so much positivity that Friday couldn't have been anything but better than the day before. We cleaned the classroom first thing and Vera repeated what we did in Rock, this time making a Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig, which the kids loved. We played frisbee with them, and I introduced them to real tiddlywinks and what with that, and the popular snap and dominoes, by the time Bella, Gilly and Sitha arrived, we had every child deeply engaged in some wonderfully educational activity or other. Gilly brought balloons with her, so many of the kids were soon distracted by them and finally, we pulled away from the school for the last time with a contented sense of achievement and a deep affection for the children we were leaving behind.
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