Quite Random

Stories of pens and cowboys

I started running PSHE (personal, social and health education) sessions this week - PSHE is a fairly big addition to the curriculum of the Young Adult Preparation Program aimed at providing the students with a more rounded outlook on life, good self-awareness and evaluation skills, and ideally a good state of health and wellbeing. We’ll be covering everything from law and order to drugs and alcohol, sex, friendships, and personal safety. I’m loosely basing it on the UK PSHE syllabus, but it goes without saying that the UK and Cambodia are miles apart not just geographically but culturally, so a lot of the material has to be contextualised, and in some cases won’t even be appropriate for use. There has been a lot of fantastic work done in some areas including sexual health education by organisations like Friends International, which saves us work and has the added advantage of already having been developed locally. As I have got more into this project I have realised that Cambodia is not a complete wasteland when it comes to existing programs or resources - it’s just knowing where to look.

The first theme is friendships, so this week we have been discussing friends and how they can help, or what they do for you. I told the group they could write down their ideas in English or Khmer if they preferred - which many of them did. Not having to translate into a second language when talking about some important ideas makes life a lot easier for them, even if it means that I need a translator - a lot more lessons will be delivered in Khmer as we go so more translation will be needed, but the ideal result at the end of the day will be Khmer language lessons delivered by a Khmer. We haven’t got to that yet as I’m developing the program as we go.

So, today I asked the group to give me examples of problems they had encountered in the past and how their friends had helped them. Lots of furrowed brows for the next ten minutes. If nothing else, these new sessions are enjoyable because the students are thinking about new things, thinking for themselves. Up until now we have concentrated on English and computer skills teaching, which is prescriptive and doesn’t require much imagination. The English books, Headway, are very good and use various themes to cover different grammar or vocabulary, but it’s all there laid out in the book and after a while starts to feel quite samey. Especially when asked to think about examples from their own lives or from the environment around them, they are much more responsive than when checking the grammar in a passage about McDonald’s hamburgers.

After ten minutes came the stories. The first was one of the boys who told me that he had lost his pen in school and so his friend had lent him one. As good as it was that he’d thought about things, however briefly, I hoped that the rest of the stories wouldn’t be about lost pens. Fortunately, they weren’t. One boy told me about how, before he came to the orphanage, he’d been a ‘cow boy’, herding cows in the countryside. Climbing up a tree to get a good look around, he fell out to the ground, was knocked unconscious, and woke up at home having been carried there by his friends. Not a tale riddled with moral complexity maybe, but the great thing was that it was told by a boy who is not normally the most confident in class in the most incredible way - he told it in English, had his arms out wide, really cared about what he was saying, and said it beautifully. I started thinking I’d been missing something in all of these English lessons, rote learning grammar and vocabulary, but it seems like maybe they’re paying off now and the group are genuinely getting confident about expressing themselves.

I’ve started taking Khmer lessons, meanwhile. My Khmer is obviously hysterically funny to Khmers because as soon as I’ve completed a sentence, puzzled expressions melt into uncontrollable laughter. I get that a lot.