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.