Banteay Chhmar Revisited

I have just come back to Siem Reap after running the second of our Writing Through workshops for the children of the Enfants du Mekong centre in the remote northern village of Banteay Chhmar.
Much has changed. The road which last year looked like this:

 
is now, well, not exactly paved, by flat and solid. The beautiful nearby temple ruins never change, but there are hints that tourism is being anticipated. There is the occasional sign and an evident path, which we still managed to lose.
Whereas last year, the village where I stayed only had electricity for an hour or so each evening, it now has 24 hour electricity all day long. The young family who I stay with now have two children instead of one, and they have moved their house 100 metres so they can be next to the grandparents. (When I say move, I mean literally take down the former house plank of wood by plank of wood, and rebuild it in the new, nearby location). The rooms now seem a bit smaller and still only consist of walls surrounding a bed with a  mosquito net. The toilet seat has gone from the outhouse. It’s now just a squat. The heat is even hotter even earlier in the year. The tractors transporting all the cut down trees over to Vietnam (which gets the best of what Cambodia produces) still start up their diesel engines at 5.30 am, as do the loudspeakers blaring monks’ lectures and wedding music. Living there for a week is, as we used to say, a trip.
The kids have changed, too. This year we taught twice as many of them: a group of new students, all in Grade 10, and the group of kids from last year, now in Grades 11 and 12. Forget about all the rest of the changes, it is the changes that we saw in these teenagers over the course of the year and this week which are the real news. I remember the older kids when I first met them last year. They were petrified of me. They could barely open their mouths to say “Hello, Teacher.” Whatever English they knew, they were too afraid to use. And they were too afraid to think. But now, they ran to greet us when we first arrived. Their responses to my questions were quick and full of energy. And they remembered so much of what we had done the year before. I was thrilled. But that sense of fear that they had last year was very evident in the new crop of  teenagers from Grade 10. To be honest, after the first class with them I was worried – for the only time in the five-year history of the Writing Workshop. It seemed they knew no English at all. Every word had to be translated by their Khmer teacher (who was the same as last year, and who had also taken part in the teacher training sessions the previous week in Sisophon – thankfully). But that was the least of it. They could barely answer any question at all in any language. But then, over the following 4 days, they opened up. They began to trust me, and more importantly, they began to trust themselves. They started to relax and those fledgling thoughts that were lurking in the back of their brains started to come forward. The theme of the week was Taking Risks. More than any other group, that theme really hit home with these kids. Walking into the workshop was a big risk for them. But then they produced this:
Risk in Cambodia
by Grade 10
 
Many years ago
Cambodia improved
Now no more
Now we lose the forest
Now it’s very hot
Not enough rain
Climate change
Dirty water
Lack of human resources
Lose many kinds of birds.
 
People are jobless
They move away
If we let this happen
We get sickness
It’s difficult.
 
But we can change.
We have to protect
the forest and the birds
Grow more trees
If we don’t make the change
We will take a big risk.
———
And you should have seen the looks on their faces after they stood up and read their work to an assembly of the school and their teachers. It was a combination of pride and shock and amazement. Man, did they party afterwards! The older kids had done it before last year. They knew they could do it again. But still they were nervous, giggly, looking to us for a thumbs up whenever they correctly pronounced a new and difficult word. It was as much a triumph for them as it was for the younger kids, as it was for their younger selves last year. And so it was a triumph for my cohort, Katy, who now goes on to lead the Writing Through workshops for the rest of the Enfants du Mekong centers over the next few months. And me? I’m feeling pretty triumphant, too, and looking forward to the arrival of my husband, and to the final 2 weeks of my stay and the remaining adventures I know it will bring.