This week is the celebration of the King’s birthday in Phnom Penh and surprise, surprise….more holidays! Cambodians seem to be very good at turning a 3 day holiday into a week, which means many of our students go away, and lessons get somewhat disrupted. As a result of this we decided to change our lesson plans for dormers at BEC this morning. When they arrived at 9 o’clock we had set up the small meeting room with the data projector, screen and comfortable chairs all ready to watch a movie about King David. We provided some drinks and nibblies and they thoroughly enjoyed this little treat. Vanny provided yet another memorable quote for us…during discussions after the movie about this time in history, Vanny was a little taken aback by one scene where Bathsheba was not fully dressed. He suggested “yes sometimes when we are watching movies we have to close our eyes and pray to God”.
The first principles class has been going well, although we forgot to mention the highlight of the inaugural class in the last blog. One particular fieldworker leading the class (who shall remain anonymous) was sitting on a rather fragile plastic chair when suddenly it gave way and all 100+kgs went crashing to the floor. Not only did the plastic chair snap at the legs but also on the way down it caused the whiteboard to fall on top of the fieldworker’s head! Luckily he did not “fall as othe
rs have fallen” (Jeremiah) and it was NOT the end of him! (If only we had had a BEC-cam set up…we could have preserved this amazing feat for future intrepid teachers to marvel at in BEC archives…is it only a wife who thinks of such things?)There are always so many snippets of life to catch on camera in PP (apart from what happens at BEC). Cambodians have absolutely no conscience about throwing their rubbish on the ground – hence the streets are constantly littered with paper and garbage. The upside of this, is that employment is provided to many recyclers and cleaners who spend their time cleaning up the streets. We see such people sweeping the never ending piles of rubbish during our early morning trips to the dorm.
Also couldn’t help but snap this hard working cyclo driver who obviously likes to keep up intelligent conversations with his patrons about world events (that’s HIS excuse anyway). The men here seem to have many ways and means of making themselves comfortable. It
is not uncommon to see them strung up in hammocks in the tiny stalls at the market, sleeping while the wife does the work! Maybe this is ‘sideways’ management!
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