The Breakfast Club

Life has become exceedingly quiet in Phnom Srok due to rice planting and transplanting season kicking off, schools slowing down in preparation for the long holidays and Grade 9 and Grade 12 exams which take the attention of my DOE colleagues. Not one to sit around doing nothing for too long, I have managed to muster up some things to do in this quiet period.

A little while a go all the education volunteers got together in Phnom Penh with some Khmer colleagues from the 6 provinces VSO works in to conduct the Annual Partnership Review meeting. Each province got the chance to present how they had worked with the VSO volunteer to meet the objectives of the programme. It was a long, hot day but a really interesting and fruitful one too. It was inspiring to see how much VSO had had an input into improving education in the country, working in collaboration with many other organisations and supporting Districts and Provinces in development. Elise and I shared our bus journey with Mr Sophan and Mr KemSovan who had undoubtedly been busy with a few whiskey bottles the night before! It was great for them to share their progress with representatives from all over the country and also really useful for them to see what else had been going on that they could learn from.

While in Phnom Penh I met with Charlene, a VSO volunteer in Kampot, to work on another edition of the Neak Smak Jet (translates to mean 'volunteer') magazine. We took over as editors of the infamous mag about a year ago and have managed to see 3 great editions go to print! I have loved having this secondary project to focus some energy on in Phnom Penh over the year. It's given me a great excuse to get out of Banteay Meanchey, led to some excellent late night conversations with Charlene and satisfied my creative cravings no end! We have turned around the mag (or so people have told us!), ditching some old parts, creating some new ones and generally given the volunteer community a spot of entertainment every few months to adorn their coffee table - or at least provide something to stick under the wobbly table leg! Charlene is definitely more of a language technician than me, spotting inconsistencies, grammar and spelling errors, while I have thoroughly enjoyed editing the photos, changing layouts and fonts and making sure our newspaper was the most eye-catching and amusing it could be. We've relied on other volunteers providing articles and photos about anything they want to write about really, from corruption to cheese triangles and we've been overwhelmed by people's response to put pen to paper! The most popular regular feature became a 'Dear Anna..." page whereby volunteers could anonymously write in their problems for the editors to answer! You wouldn't believe volunteers could have so many problems!

At the APR meeting in Phnom Penh we were treated to watch a 20 minute DVD that VSO Cambodia has put together of the progress made in the 6 target provinces its been working in over the last 4 years. The DVD gave a fantastic overview of work that has been done and developments in community involvement in schools, improved leadership and management skills of school directors, and so on. With schools in Phnom Srok closing and with not much going on I decided to invite my work colleagues to one of the Breakfast restaurants in the village to watch the DVD over Koi Teol (noodle soup) and coffee. It was a hit! My colleagues from the DOE all turned up to the restaurant where the landlord had reserved tables near the TV (on which some American wrestling programme is normally watched, powered by a generator) and we all tucked into breakfast together. We repeated the treat with school directors on the following day and it seemed to be successful. It was great to see school directors getting out their notebooks to record the things they were watching about schools miles away in different provinces.