Riverkids Project

The stationary store at the wholesale market where we bought the stationary for the first graders. The markets are great fun - lots of tiny stalls where you negotiate for things from vinyl flooring for an apartment, restaurant ware, bales of clothes and more.

The social worker at the back of the truck with all the boxes of stationary that we bought for the first grade students. They were packed into little bags, pencil, sharpner and eraser, two exercise books and a pack of colour pencils and some sweets. I was way too shy to go in and distribute them, and we felt it was better for the teachers to hand them out, than strangers, so the social worker and I hid in the back and packed them into classroom boxes.

This was the first classroom we went into. The teacher was able to control the entire classroom with her voice alone, which was pretty remarkable. The classrooms were all clean and tidy, but with the bare minimum. The children have little slates in front of them that they use for practice, as exercise books are too expensive for anything but homework.

The clasped hands that some of the kids are doing is the customary polite greeting. I think (if I squint) that the kids in the far right corner are ours as well.

The bench under the big whiteboard is so the little kids can jump up and reach the board when it's their turn to practice.

The state school our kids attend is in Steung Mean Chay, a pretty poor neighbourhood ooutside of central Phnom Penh. It's near the municipal garbage dumps where sadly a lot of families make their living. For us, that means that the school which has very little government funding (like most) has some help from a large French NGO, Pour les Souristes d'Enfant, which works with those families.

The school office had a little garden set up out front. I saw some of the older students (they got from grade 1 to 6) pottering around in there. It was a nice bright spot in a dusty school.

This is the new school building being built, and as far as I can tell, sponsored by PSE. Behind the other building there's a new one recently built, which we walked around - bright and clean and roomy.

The kids standing up at the back are in our project. This is first grade and they're spending the schoolday on Khmer language and on Cambodian history. From what I could gather, two subjects are taught every day.

All the school bicycles lined up in the school yard. Bikes are fairly expensive, but daily transport if you can't walk to school, adds up expensively from rides on a motorbike or cyclo. There are no school buses for state school, unless privately organised.Our kids live too far away to safely bike.

This is a snapshot of the riverside where most of the kids come from. Depending on how relatively wealthy a family is, they might own and live in a boat which they moor alongside the river and take out to fish in. The boats range from very simple with barely a roof to comparably comfortable with even electricity linked up. Poorer families live in little shacks on the riverside, which often get flooded out or occasionally burnt. There's a more permanant settlement nearby, wooden huts which make up a slum, but the rental is too much for most of the families by the riverside, even sharing a single room with others, plus the loss of livelihood.

Cheeky monkeys! Barefoot is pretty much the rule of the day here, especially when playing.

Most of the riverside is mud and a bit of plants - the floods clear it all out, and there's no garbage system or sanitation, beyond two public toilets for pay further down the road. The place smells pretty bad, and it's dusty and grimy, but you get used to it fast. One of the little shacks just behind the laundry is a sort of coffeshop with iced drinks and snacks.

Lyna Sok talking to some of the kids playing. The children she's pointing to are in the kindercare program, which is on holiday break for December. The kids were playing catch and running around chasing puppies. The man behind is fixing up a smaller boat, not a boat for living on, but one for working and travelling on.

Our kids getting ready for tuition - no uniforms, so they're in their usual clothes. It was pretty cold the week I was there, hence the long sleeves and jackets, well cold for the tropics. The kids line up by height or age. There was too much fuss over seats so they've had their seats assigned to them now and get their names ticked off as they go into the truck. One downside of assigned seating was two best friends who had a massive quarrel the day before and had to sit next to each other sulking all the way to class!

This is the truck that the kids take to class. The AoG church owns it and we pay for gas. There are four benches, two on the side and two in the middle, plus a woven rattan roof. When the kids are all piled in, the back of the truck goes up and a safety bar goes across the top. The man helping them up is the driver - his son is already in the truck near the back.

Playtime during a ten-minute break at the tuition centre. There weren't any toys on site so I bought a few small dolls, skipping ropes, fake-lego and animal figures to play with. The kids use hair-clips and bits of paper to make game pieces that they scratch out on the ground, and they play a lot of active jump up and down games.

Lining up ready to get on the bus to go back to the riverside for lunch at home and to get changed for school. The woman near the gate is the Vietnamese teacher.

At the end of general Khmer tuition, the grade one children go to play while the grade two, three and four children, get specific tuition. The woman at the side is the Khmer teacher who's been working with some of the kids for two years now.

Studying hard! Khmer script is a bit like indian languages, all curls. It's got a big alphabet and (to me) a complicated grammer. It's one of those languages you can speak badly in fast, but real fluency takes a very long time. The children almost all have beautiful script, very tidy and neat. Breakfast for this little girl was a baguette with fish paste.