I taught English classes for two weeks at Khnar School as part of the Ponheary Ly Foundation’s volunteer programme. This is a rural school about an hour by tuktuk from Siem Reap. The children in the area are poor and their families uneducated. The goal of the Foundation is to provide educational opportunities to such children to avoid the common alternative of their being sent to work at nearby temples selling postcards and so on to tourists, thereby condemning them to a lifetime of poverty. The Foundation’s belief is that education will provide them with some choices that they will otherwise lack.  

So, donations to the Foundation provide school uniforms, school bags, books and resources, breakfasts, teachers’ salaries, English lessons, health care, bicycles for them to get to school and much more. The government spends 53 cents per child per year on education in Cambodia. Schools that aren’t lucky enough to be ‘adopted’ by an NGO or similar, clearly cannot get by.

The kids are delightful. Keen to learn, their enthusiasm is infectious. Homework excites them; they choose to come to school for English classes even when the rest of the school is closed for a statutory holiday! The classrooms are hot and basic with no resources and no electricity. But the kids are sponges, intent on getting as much as they possibly can out of each lesson, and they learn incredibly fast.

My lack of Khmer and their lack of English matters little as they master the complexities of telling the time in English. Luckily, we have a whiteboard because I teach them a few learning games and their favourite, just as with my New Zealand students, turns out to be the board game!