problems, solutions, and tiddlywinks

The work in Tackok Charai has been tough these last few weeks though. The first week back after new year approached me with an intense feeling of dread. I have to admit I was ashamed about that and I definitely kicked myself for it in hindsight, because it was solely a reaction to having had such a wonderful christmas break and knowing that the work was about to start again and all the worries and agitations that came with that. Also I was annoyed because we had specifically rejigged our timetable plans to make sure that the first week back was open for whatever ideas mum and Meg were going to bring out with them, so I was feeling cheated out of the experience of showing the village to my family. Despite all the unhealthy negativity in my head however, the week turned out fine. We focused less on arts and crafts and more on other activities, doing more sport and logic with the kids. This ended up being a breath of fresh air I think, not just for us, but also for the children, who loved being out of doors. 

We taught the kids how to make tiddlywinks frogs out of paper and had a very successful tiddlywinks frog competition, complete with tournament arena! Also when we arrived the decking of the school was strewn with bits of used cardboard which seemed to have been noncommittally dumped there. This turned out to be a blessing as I ended up determinedly cutting it all into playing card shaped pieces and we spent a whole day getting the kids to try and make card pyramids with them. I was worried this task would go over the tops of many of their heads, but even some of the youngest children managed it and even those who didn’t had an undeniable determination and concentration, even if they ended up piling them into completely different structures in the end. A funny moment came with the activity; because we didn’t have enough cardboard for every child to use, we had half the class doing free drawing and then swapped them around later. Vera tried, with sign language, to explain this to the jealous youngsters who were doing drawing first, by pointing at the other children and the pointing at her watch. With returning to the table 10 minutes later came the discovery that she had unintentionally inspired twenty identical drawings of watches!

the complete concentration

"i tried your way, but mine's just more fun!"

the older boys

The next week we focused on observational drawing, because it had been so successful in Rock. Doing this with no language meant that we had to hope the kids understood what we were asking them to. We ended up, on the first day, with a lot of very un-lifelike (I hope!) drawings of me from the youngest kids, and from the grade twos drawings of the school which bore no relationship to the reality except that they all showed three classrooms and a platform. On the second day we took the kids down to the river near the village to draw and this, I think mostly because of Vera’s exquisite examples and deep concentration in observing as she drew, worked a little better. What was lovely to see was that when we got back to the school, one of the eldest boys spent his break-time sat on the decking drawing the view out over they playground with pretty good accuracy, considering that the day before he had been adding extra fencing to the school deck in his drawing, so that what was in reality a rectangle shape had become a wonky heptagon on paper. One child at a time, I suppose.

the observational drawing with the little ones

and with the older ones, on the other side of the river

tiddlywink frog tournament

the most determined tiddlywinkers

trying to encourage the cool ones to join in - it even looks like we're communicating in more than just sign language!

This last week has been the biggest challenge. Not necessarily in the lessons themselves, but in our own heads. In terms of teaching, the week was quite successful, the highlight being that we managed to use up some more of the cardboard in making tiny model stilted houses with the older children. This activity was hard and required lots of editing from me and Vera in terms of the accuracy of each stage of the process, which was not helped by the fact that the glue we were using was not friendly to the time we had to make the models. However, because of the slowness of the process, and the fact that we had to work through it with the children stage by stage (I say children, but most of the older class are actually older that me and Vera, some by three or four years!), we actually interacted with them on a much more personal level, making jokes and laughing together. It was nice to sit with them in that way, pointing at things and naming them in Charai (the tribal language) and English and laughing at each others’ pronunciation. It was the closest we have gotten to really getting to know individuals among the children, something that is very hard to do without language, and it was nice to see how much more comfortable they are with us now. But for the first time, this week, Vera and I sat down together and really talked about how the work has been making us feel. We are only meant to have had two more weeks in Tackok Charai, but having talked to each other we’ve seen that neither of us feel as though we have two weeks worth to offer the school. The teachers in the school are incredibly capable, especially compared to those at Rock, and the two of us, without thinking that we have been ineffective, which I hope isn’t the case, feel as though we have done what we set out to do in the school and that staying longer would change that into a feeling of uselessness that has been playing at the back of my mind for a while. Talking to Gilly, back in Banlung, we realized that just because we planned another two weeks, does not mean that, in the light of our recent courage to speak up about our thoughts, we cannot change that plan. We both felt that we were in danger of losing our enthusiasm for the work and that is a threat that would be picked up on by the children and even the community. So, this coming week will be our last in Tackok Charai, giving us an extra week to fill with exciting projects yet to be finalized. I think we were both feeling very scared of leaving the project thinking that we had lost momentum and not done as well as we could close to the end and this change of plan has relieved me of a burden that I didn’t realise was that strong.

Chris came back to Cambodia this week. He left us here at the start of November; the first time he had ever left the project in the hands of others in this way. I can imagine that was a very scary thing for him and his returning attitude seems to have been one of pleasant surprised mingled with an underlying feeling that he has lost some of his original control. We have changed so many finer details within the project and made, thinking back, a surprising amount of progress, especially in the case of Bella and Gilly, and for Chris to come back and see so much going on behind the scenes I can imagine would be quite a revelation, especially because the whole project started with him alone.

There was a funny moment when Gilly and I joined Sitha and Chris to Padol, another school, on Friday morning. While Chris and Sitha talked to the teacher, Gilly and I took over the classroom for a few minutes and tried to teach the children Row Row Row Your Boat,  which, considering the language, they were picking up surprisingly fast. Chris then strode in in his affectionately domineering way with a “Let me show you how it’s done” and within seconds had the previously timid kids shouting and laughing along with a different song, so Gilly and I left him to it. I did let myself point out afterwards that “That looked like fun Chris, but let’s be honest, they did learn that song three years ago!” It was just funny to see Chris’ enthusiasm to be back in front of a class and display his blatantly advanced (compared to me - not Gilly) teaching experience. He has been working so hard outside of Cambodia trying to raise funds for UWS that he gets very little time to reap the rewards of having 10 schools full of enthusiastic children waiting for any kind of interaction with enthusiastic teachers!

So, in hindsight, I may not have justified in the negativity from the start of this entry, but that may be because all the weight of the last few weeks is now feeling very insignificant having settled any worries into very pleasing solutions.