Tarantulas, Teaching & A Toursit Checklist

COUNTRY: Cambodia
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Community Healthcare & Teaching
WRITTEN BY: Emily Miller

Last weekend we went to Phnom Penh to visit the Killing Fields, S21 and the Russian Markets. The six-hour drive was definitely an interesting one in which there really wasn’t any road or at least if there was, it didn’t much matter what side people drove on.

In my last post, I promised a surprise and I'm always one to keep my word, so here it is. On Saturday night we went to a restaurant that is used to help get kids off the street. This restaurant is known for one dish in particular… fried tarantula! And yes, we all ate it! Although some of us like myself enjoyed it a lot more than others, agreeing that it tasted just like chicken.

This week we were all a little sad about having to leave at the end of next week and wondered if we’d done enough during our time here. We’re all aware that while we can’t change the world in four weeks, we can certainly make a difference, so we decided to have a discussion about what it is we wanted to accomplish through our fundraising. In the end we decided that we will provide all the houses we visited with basic supplies, put money towards a water pump for the people in the back houses as some have to walk three kilometres to access water and to help improve opportunities to play sport at the school.

This week in the health promotion classes Amanda and I focused on first aid, malaria and dengue fever. Tuesday was a public holiday and unfortunately Rachael and Sasha had very few females turn up to their class so the next day Amanda and I shared our lesson so they too could gain a greater experience with teaching health. The health promotion classes are going really well and the adults are always telling us how much we are helping them. I think they’ve taught us a lot too, particularly in terms of how they do things in their culture with such limited resources.

In English this week we took a step back to phonics as a lot of the children were having trouble pronouncing the harder words. This worked really well and by the end of the week we could already see an improvement. During the week we also did a lot more art to help brighten up the classrooms which the kids loved. Both the older class, run by myself and Amanda, and the younger class, run by Rachael and Sasha, are progressing along really well, some of the kids are even able to complete whole sentences now in English. One day this week we decided to separate the classes based on ability rather than age. Rachael and Sasha took the advanced class, whilst Amanda and I stayed with the children who still required a little more work. This worked really well as the more advanced children were given an opportunity to challenge themselves.

This week was our last week of house visits as next week we will be handing out all of the supplies. The house visits have been really successful and we are extremely happy with how many houses we have managed to visit. It really is a great insight into how these people live.

On the weekend we went to Battambang to visit a circus run by an NGO at a local school. We also took a ride on the bamboo train and hiked to the notorious killing caves. It was a short weekend away but definitely an exciting one! We all agreed that the circus was amazing and the talent was fantastic. Rachel even had a moment in the spotlight during the performance when a boy came up to her as part of an act and spoke to her in Khmer where she quickly responded ‘khnom men yol’ meaning ‘I don’t understand’ in English.

On Sunday we were taken out to a buffet breakfast. It was such a treat and I certainly didn’t hold back, I actually had five courses! For the rest of the day we relaxed by the pool, did some shopping and fitted in lesson plans for our final week. Overall this week has been a huge success.