Isn't it beautiful?

I love the new school! Everyone does, really. I'll try to get pictures of my new classroom on here once it's set up. I should've taken pictures of my old one before dismantling it! The new one is about double the size. Click here to see photos (not mine, sorry) of the new school.

And here are photos from the elementary and middle/high school Christmas concerts!

Who Needs Normal?

Logos is not normal, as any of my students will tell you. (Most have transferred here.) In so many ways, Logos is an anomaly. It is unusual by any standard I can think of, in any culture. And after a semester, I'm still astounded by it.

Logos is a place full of students from broken families, from adoptive families, from single-parent families, from non-nuclear families. (Non-nuclear is normal here: living with your aunt or grandpa doesn't mean that your parents are totally absent or have passed away, although that's the case for some students.) I have students who live by themselves and students who might as well live by themselves because their parents work nonstop. I have students who have witnessed a murder, been kidnapped for ransom money, been a victim of rape, whose birth moms worked in prostitution. Then I also have students from super-inspirational missionary families, whose parents have done incredible things.

Logos is a place of privilege and financial need. One student's dad is close to Prime Minister Hun Sen. I have students whose families have their own chauffeurs, who stay at luxury hotels during their trips to Hong Kong and Bangkok, whose homes clearly fall into the "mansion" category. And I have students who have never taken a vacation, for whom $3 shirts at Russian Market seem exorbitant, whose recent grocery trips have come back a little lighter than they'd like. One of my co-workers used to work on an assembly line at a garment factory.

Logos is a place full of outstanding students. It's easily the toughest school in all of Cambodia. Coursework is roughly as rigorous as State High, the school full of professors' kids where I taught last year. It's 100% in English, although about 90% of students are non-native English speakers. Their English is incredible in most ways, so that I'm taken aback when they've never heard of a toddler or a porch, or when they ask me to plug out an appliance. They work hard to understand physics and government and sonnets, and to communicate about them in a borrowed language.

Logos is also a crazy place spiritually. It's almost like a youth group in terms of teachers' close relationship with students. When a student cheated, I prayed with him. Students freely include Bible verses in their essays. And the faith of many students is truly amazing to me. But not all students are Christian or even know what they believe. A few have fallen out with their Buddhist families because of their Christian faith. Some, who are definitely Christian, struggle with obvious sin issues like rage and theft and sexual sin. These students are still very much a part of the Logos family. And I've seen spiritual fruit in them even as they deal with ongoing stuff. I've seen students show each other grace, support each other, and be real with each other in astonishing ways.

Logos was started haphazardly and has experienced much chaos. It was and is staffed by inexperienced and sinful and issue-filled people. It doesn't deserve to be anything special. And yet it is a place where God is so present. It's a place that is dear to many hearts, mine increasingly so. It's going to be a shock for me to go anywhere else after here... I'm hoping I won't have to for a while.

Moving!

The semester ended today (Friday the 18^th), meaning that exams were given this week (in high school only – middle school still had normal classes, in theory) and report cards were handed out this afternoon. Today was also our last day in our current location, so we recruited all middle and high school students to help the teachers label the desks, pack the books, take down the posters, and load the trucks. Tomorrow, we’ll begin unpacking in our gorgeous new facilities on the outskirts of town. Students and teachers worked HARD today and got a lot done! Many of them have never really done chores, so they have limited experience with this kind of manual labor. It's child labor, they cried! It's character building, I retorted.

It’s been neat to get a glimpse of the building process, albeit only toward the end of it. For example, in Cambodia, the construction crews are generally from the provinces (AKA rural areas). They move around for different jobs, bringing their families, and sleep at the construction site. So when I went out to visit the school about six weeks ago, I found the ground level full of hammocks, cooking areas, small children, and roosters. Another interesting tidbit is that we got to pick our paint colors for our new rooms! I picked a sage green for two walls and cream for another two walls, but a few teachers went bolder, with salmon or bright red on some walls. Because paint jobs don’t last very long here, it’s not a big deal to have a color not every teacher would love: they’ll be painted over in a year or two, anyway.

Many students’ first official tour of the school came last weekend, at the middle and high school Christmas concert. It was Logos’ first-ever band concert (for middle school only), and it was a labor of love to acquire instruments for the band! You can buy guitars and local traditional instruments here, but I guess not things like flutes and trumpets and keyboards. So they arrived very piecemeal, from donors overseas or in suitcases. I was quite impressed by their sound! It was a step above my memory of middle school band concerts, partly because of strategic placement of several musically gifted students. The choir concert also sounded lovely. Everyone wore black clothes, which is strongly associated with mourning here, so the girls also wore the beautiful scarves available at markets here. It looked so nice together.

I’m quite excited for my new classroom! It’s considerably larger, and I'll actually have options in arranging the seats. (Right now, the rows are packed in, and students in the fifth row always complain they can't see to the front in my long, narrow room. There, I can have twice as many front-row seats, since that's where many students prefer to sit! I never had this problem in the US.) All that I’m dreading is the distance (about a 10-minute car or moto ride, or 15 minutes by tuk-tuk). It’s been so great to dash over to school on foot to grade on the weekends, or swim in the pool, or use their Internet. Now I’ll need to be more organized, especially since Sarah and I are hoping to share a moto. Many Logos families are moving out to that area: housing is cheap, and almost all expats in Cambodia rent properties, so it’s not hard to move. Logos will really shape the neighborhood, where no homes even existed a few years ago, and many new ones are still being built. But it’s pretty isolated from markets, farther from downtown, etc. I’m also really attached to Sovannary and a few of the neighbor girls. So I’d consider moving after next summer, but it’d be so nice to stay here in Toul Kork.

Christmas...and not a fried banana in sight.

The Logos staff Christmas party was last night, and I did my part as a verified Sunshine Committee (aka Party Planning) member by...
1. Arriving early to help decorate the pillars with festive ribbons
2. Providing many people's first-ever taste of buckeyes (balls of peanut butter and powdered sugar dipped in melted chocolate chips) - who knew they were such a regional dish? By the way, I used some precious US chocolate chips, since only one grocery store here carries any. Since even those wouldn't melt properly on my overactive stovetop, it was a labor of love by Sarah and me.
3. Playing the Yankee gift swap game, using the gift Sarah wrapped: a free Rudy DVD that we found in our apartment when moving in. It had the dubious distinction of being the last of 26 gifts to be chosen from the pile. At least it went to Shirley, another Philly native, and not one of the guards or cleaners who speak next to no English and have never seen a football game.

By the way, the big joke in planning the potluck dinner was how many fried bananas there would be. Last year, apparently all 8 or so of the guards decided that fried bananas from street vendors (delicious and cheap) would make an excellent addition to the feast. This year, we instituted a signup sheet for various categories, in part to impede a similar glut of fried fruit. It seems fried bananas here are Cambodia's answer to Doritos.

Click here to see photos of our rooftop festivities at the principal's house.