This morning I tagged along with some of our Cambodian staff as they headed to the village where they work. The majority of FH Cambodia staff are called Community Facilitators--these are the staff who actually work with leaders and families in the villages around Anlong Veng. Each Community Facilitator focuses on walking with their village through one main skill or tool or focus: health and sanitation, agriculture, child development, or financial savings groups. Being Thursday, today is the day of the week that most of our child development staff have kid's club type programs in the villages. As part of my role here will be to assist these child development staff with their teaching techniqes, I try to tag along when they go to work with the kids to see what's already happening, what's going well, and where we'll be able to improve.
So--I headed out this morning with three of the staff on my team, Kunthea, Sovannary, and Thiera (the first is female, the second two are male). The four of us took two motos and headed out in our rain ponchos, as the after affects of Typhoon Ketsana, which caused so many problems in the Phillipines, were still giving us plenty of rain. Our goal was Prolean village, a widespread community about ten kilometers out with around 100 homes. We turned off of the main, paved road, and onto a more typical dirt road. As it is the rainy season, mud and puddles (or lakes...) and potholes are a matter of course, but after a few days of steady rain things get soggier than normal. Such was the case today after the Ketsana rains. We made it pretty close to the community before we pulled up on some pretty impressive flooding covering the road. There were several people taking advantage of this new water source close to their homes: a man washing his motorbike, a lady doing laundry, a whole herd of kids floating and splashing around. They made sure we knew the water was too deep to make it through on the moto without drowing out our spark plugs, so--we turned around to try a different road.
Luckily, because Prolean is so spread out, there are various roads to get there. One of these roads heads out through rice fields before emptying out onto a wide, flat, long stretch of gravel--Anlong Veng's very own landing strip for small planes. In fact, the Khmer word for "airport" is where Prolean village gets it's name.
We didn't take the road through the runway today, but the road we took did get us to the community just fine, albeit with mud-splashed legs. We stopped at the house where the weekly kid's club is held and washed up by scooping rainwater out of the large cement cisterns that are common here. Normally, schools in the Anlong Veng district have Thursdays off, sometimes holding classes on Saturdays instead, which makes Thursday the day of choice for our staff to run their kid's programs. Today, though, class was in session, so we ended up waiting for a bit for some of the students to finish up at school and head our way. Keep in mind that rural Cambodian schools have a lot of room for growth--most school days last for three hours or less, with teachers working either part-time or teaching two seperate groups of students in the morning and afternoon. The kids we saw today had already been to school and walked or biked the 10km back to Prolean in time to show up at our class around 9:30.
This lack of quality education is one reason our staff host kid's clubs--part of the material they present is basic language and math skills to supplement what the kids are able to pick up in formal school. The programs also feature some basic English teaching, songs, games, health and sanitation education (handwashing, teethbrushing, etc.), and, where village chiefs are open to it, Bible stories and prayer. Today's class focused on "a,b,c,d" and "door, apple, pig, dog". That along with a song or two and a stealing-places-from-each-other-in-a-circle game wrapped things up--while we have some amazing children's staff, as you can imagine there is plenty of room for growth in our kid's programs as well...
After today's class wrapped up, I went with one of the staff to visit a widow in the community. My guess is she is in her forties, with two children, the younger of which is about 10 or 11. A widow for ten years, she has been sick since this spring with some sort of abdominal ailment that leaves her looking like she is six or seven months pregnant. Treatment options are expensive, so we'll see what happens. We prayed with her and hopped back on the bike to head back to Anlong Veng for lunch. This afternoon it's back at the office, editing some English reports for our leadership staff and attempting to download a new antivirus program that I'll be installing on all the staff computers. With a little time out for some overdue blogging :) I apologize for the lack of pictures this time!
