I left the house the next morning for my 1st day at the school where I will be teaching computer classes. I got to the school at around 9.30am and was told that John, the guy in charge here was at one of their other sites this morning and wouldn’t be back here until 12 noon so I needed to wait for him. I was wishing I had brought a book with me! I sat waiting, and one of the ladies asked if I wanted to take a look around while I was waiting and I happily accepted. She took me to see the older students, and the computer room. They have 12 laptops there which were donated to the school. We went back to the main building and she took me up to see the various classes. We went into the grade 1 class, and she then said that the children there have no teacher today so can I please just teach them some English?! Err…what?? I wasn’t prepared for that at all! Inside, I was screaming ‘no no no’! But somehow, I found myself saying ‘yes sure, if that’s what you need’! The children were lovely though! Just so incredibly cute! They were all hugging me asking my name and where I’m from and 1 girl kept making heart shapes with her hands to me. So adorable! I had no idea what level they were at so I started writing some letters of the alphabet on the board and asking them what letters they were. I did the same with numbers, and pointed to colours around the room to see if they knew the names. I started teaching them how to write capital letters and lowercase letters, and how to write the names of colours. I was just running out of ideas of what else to do when the bell rang. It was 11am and the children explained that it was time for their lunch break! I was happy the class was over! And also so grateful that I had done some volunteering teaching before I got here, otherwise I would have been completely lost!
I went back down to the staff room and met the other volunteers who are all here teaching English. There are a few from China, some from Taiwan, and others from Austria, France, Poland, Denmark, Holland, and the US. I chatted to them a bit while having lunch. I then met John after lunch and he apologised for his absence that morning. He said he had passed a message to someone telling me to come at 12 but the message didn’t get to me. We chatted a bit about our backgrounds. He seems nice, he’s from New Zealand and was a teacher there. He came here as a volunteer for 5 months and decided to stay here longer so accepted a job here. He told me a bit about the school. The school is called PIO school, PIO stands for People Improvement Organization. Please take a few minutes to read about it at http://www.peopleimprovement.org and you can see lots of pictures on their Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/pio.cambodia. The school is in the slum area here and was started on what used to be the city rubbish dump. The children here would spend their day digging through the rubbish trying to find food for their family so the school was started to try and provide a better future for the children here. In addition to the school, they have a shelter here which John showed me. The shelter houses 70 of the local children who have no one to look after them. They have a room for the girls and a room for the boys which consists of just lines of wooden planks where the children sleep, and then a communal area where they eat and study and a small kitchen area. There is just 1 lady who lives on site here and cooks for the children and looks after them. Imagine that, it must be like being a mother to 70 children! And then they have another lady who comes for a few hours after school and helps provide some pastoral care. The organisation are really doing a lot for this community. They provide bags of rice for the families whose children attend the school to encourage them to keep sending their children to school because often, the families see the children as an extra worker for the home who could be out trying to help them find some food instead of spending the day in school. I was then shown around the various classrooms. One of the boys in the class I taught in the morning saw me and ran to me and grabbed my hand shouting teacher Anne! He dragged me to the classroom and all the other kids started shouting and hugging me! We carried on the tour, I saw the other classes and then the lunch area and the kitchen area where the children get a free lunch cooked for them. The money to build the various floors in the school have been donated by various organisations and you can just see how much it is worth it, just seeing the big smiles on the children’s faces and seeing how happy they are to be here learning.
We went back down to the office to have a chat about the work I can do here. John mentioned that they have some computers that were donated to the school which have just been sitting around so they need help to check what state they are in and help set them up. If any of the computers are good enough, then they want me to help use 1 to build a server which can be used for saving files across the school. Students can currently only save files locally which means that they have to use the same computer to work each time and if the computer is not available, then they can’t access their work so they need somewhere central where they can save their work and access it from anywhere. Also they need to be able to share the printer across all the computers in the school as currently they only have printing facilities on 1 computer in the staff office which makes it difficult for them. And then the main computer they have in the office has all of the important documents for the school saved on it and the computer has been in and out of repair for years and is dying and they are worried about losing all of the important data on it so they would like to move all of the data to one of the new computers and create some sort of backup system. They then wanted some web pages built which they can use to input data and store it in a database so that they can generate reports from the data easily to save some of the manual work they have to do. And then they want me to teach the older children how to use Photoshop. There was quite a lot of stuff they needed but I was happy as it means I will be busy here. I was a bit apprehensive about a couple of the things, I’ve never set up a server before and he wanted to use a Unix based system as they can’t afford the Windows software so it was all completely new to me but I was sure I would be able to figure it out over the 4 weeks I am here for. And it will be good experience! And then I have no idea how to use Photoshop myself so need to learn quick! Before its time for me to teach the children! Overall I was very happy that I will be able to use my IT skills to help them.