Today was my first day at RUPP (as everyone here says - no one actually says the Royal University of Phnom Penh - in fact, even when I say the Royal University, people usually say, you mean RUPP?). I got up nice and early this morning so that I’d be all prepared to go and would be on time for my first staff meeting.
Outside the guest house, there are usually about four or five tuk-tuk drivers waiting to take guests around the city. They’re usually considered more suely reliable than some of the others you can randomly catch on the street because they tend to show up everyday at this one place (meaning they’re recognizable and that this is their living so they are less inclined to just take advantage of picking up a foreigner and either not knowing where to go or taking them someplace they don’t want to go). Anyway, tuk-tuks are great for multiple people but excessive for just one, so I asked for a moto when I came out, at which point they usually call one of their friends who has a moto to come from the other corner of the block. Anyway, today, my moto driver spoke pretty good English (which makes it easier than just pointing and hoping they understand). I brought my map out with me to point to the area near where the university is. I was taken aback when he asked where in particular I was going in English. When I told him, he said to hop on and that he knew exactly where it was. I already liked him.
Traffic here can only be described as super chaotic. People drive on all sides of the road, and the fact that there are a mix of cars, motos, tuk-tuks, and the occasional bicycle make it a huge mess. Things that I’ve learned so far are that it’s okay to go on the wrong side of the road against traffic as long as you just made a turn onto that road and are planning on getting over to the correct side within about three blocks. When the light turns green for your street and red for the perpendicular street, it doesn’t mean that drivers on the other street have to stop immediately and that you will have complete right of way; it just means that the drivers on your road now have the right to try to start penetrating into the intersection in order to create stronger flow of traffic in your direction. At that point, the other road has to stop until their light turns green again. Also, although motos dominate the road, there are cars around, mostly owned by wealthier Cambodians. Although there are the occasional beat-up cheaper Toyota sedans, the fashion police in Cambodia must have a rule that says that, if you can afford a nice SUV, you must announce it to the world. Therefore, law 255675 (or some similar number) mandates that you must plaster decals that say “Lexus” or “Land Cruiser” on as many surfaces of those cars as you can. I still haven’t figured out what the cars without any license plates at all are for, though I assume those Mercedes and Lexuses must denote an even higher level or status (or connection with the government?). In general, people seem to come within inches of each other, but kind of like being on the water, where there are no clear “roads” or “paths,” people exaggerate the direction that they are turning in ahead of time and the other drivers coming at you will go around you on the side that you’re turning from, even if you feel like you’re playing chicken for a while.
Anyway, when we arrived to the university, my moto driver asked if I wanted him to pick me up at a certain time. I didn’t know when I’d be done at that point, but we made plans for him to start driving me on a regular basis. And so I think I have probably found my regular moto driver.
The university is a good 20 minutes from the center of downtown, close to where I’m living now. It’s on Russian Boulevard, which connects the airport to downtown and is probably about half way between. The campus is fairly big and was built in 1960’s architecture, with the main building standing at about 7 stories. I found out some of the history later in the morning from one of the other expat English teachers who was generous in taking it upon himself to make sure that I knew where everything was, how things worked, and had any questions I had answered. The university was founded in the early 1960’s under the French and was apparently a pretty well respected university until the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. You can see the former glory from the Olympic size swimming pool behind the main building, which now just serves as an algae generator for the few feet of water that accumulate in the bottom from rain. Originally, the instruction was mostly in French, and the school boasted nearly two hundred professors and (I believe) about a thousand students.
When the Khmer Rouge came to power; however, everything changed. The school was obviously shut down, and the auditorium next to the main building was used as a holding place for prisoners on their way to Tuol Sleng, the infamous torturing and execution center housed in a former elementary school in downtown Phnom Penh. Rumor has it that the main building used to house pigs during this period. By the time the Khmer Rouge were kicked out and the university reopened, only two of the original professors and twenty of the original students remained. The rest had either fled or been killed. In this way, the university is still in the process of rebuilding itself.
The campus feels pretty bustling at this point. All teachers have an undergraduate degree and many or most have masters as well, though there aren’t any PhDs yet, which Steve, the other teacher giving me this information, believes will begin to change soon. Students live off-campus, but it is expected that the first on-campus dorms will appear in the near future as well. And it was emphasized to me that just one person, Sister Louise, the woman who I have been in contact with over the summer and who helped arrange this position with PiA, bears the majority of the credit for almost single handedly getting the university off the ground again some years ago. All in all, I found the setting to be more inspiring than sad. The progress from year to year and the expansion and improvement in quality and population of the school from year to year feels apparent. It feels, at least on first impression, like a place of hope for improvement more than one that mourns the past.
Anyway, I received a warm welcome in room 302 by the other English teachers. The faculty is larger than I expected, with about 25 in our department alone, and the facilities and level of English are much better than I expected they would be after teaching in Jishou last summer. In contrast to there, all of the English teachers legitimately speak English (which, although it sounds funny, wasn’t really the case in our area of China). Additionally, there is a language resource center for the students, with books, computers, internet access, VHS tapes, headphones and other things like that. All in all, the general level of the university was higher than I expected.
At the meeting, I got the sense that the teachers really get along well and enjoy each other’s company. There are 4 older expat teachers, and the rest are younger Cambodians. There is one other new expat teacher, but I’m not sure her age, and she won’t be arriving until Wed. Additionally, in contrast to SOS in China last summer, where we created our own curriculum, there is a set agenda and specific goals, grammatical construction, and comprehension objectives for each level. Although this takes some degree of creativity out of the classroom, it seems a lot more manageable on a year-long basis than teaching in China last summer did, which was very exciting and challenging but which we all pretty much got completely burned out after our two months there. This way seems much more sustainable, and the specific units and objectives seem more appropriate for a semester long course, while the format of last summer was great for our objectives for that program.
I’ll be teaching lower intermediate and essay writing as my two classes, and I teach only in the afternoons. Best of all in easing the transition from Princeton, there are no classes on Friday! We just have a staff meeting most Friday mornings. Other than that, I got a sense for the way classes run, who the other teachers are, where are group office is, where things are on campus, and some of the ways in which the year will run. All in all, it seems pretty good. Many of the teachers came up to me individually to welcome me, introduce themselves, and make themselves available for me. In fact, I already received and was rescinded an invitation to join one of the other teachers at the Vietnamese Embassy for an event. She invited me because she received an invitation in the mail yesterday for her and her husband, but since her husband was unavailable, she wanted to know if I had any interest in joining her. Unfortunately, neither she or I could read the Vietnamese on the invitation, but I thought it would be an experience. However, she came up to me later and told me that unfortunately we couldn’t go. Although the dance performance celebrating an anniversary of the embassy in Cambodia sounded appealing, when she had it translated, she realized that it would be a little difficult to make the June 14, 2007 date at this point.
Since I got a copy of the textbook, I found it amusing how US-focused the text books were, as there are units about driving your car and planning your beach vacation to Mexico. I’m not sure of the exact syllabus yet since we have our specific level-oriented meetings later in the week, but there might need to be some improvisation with some of the stuff. Some things like that I just can’t picture the students really relating to, but the staff seems very committed and organized so I would even guess they’ve already thought of that. Anyway, that’s all for now. Sorry for the detail-oriented nature of these first blogs, but I’m just trying to set the stage and context for future entries.
As a general realization since I’ve been here, I’ve certainly realized the importance of safety and security for a person’s well-being and for the successful functioning of society In Politics classes, we always learned about the philosophical origins of states: that people banded together to form them in order to ensure security, even if it meant given up certain freedoms in the interest of adhering the society’s rules. I feel as though I have seen the truth to this first hand. Although I’m not completely comfortable in the city and although I’m not planning on forming any new states any time soon, I can feel the difference between when I arrived and today in terms of my perceived level of safety. I’ve slowly gone from being scared to do most things out of fear of whether they’d be too dangerous to slowly realizing which things are okay and therefore adding them to my possible activities. These include things like taking a moto at night to and from specific places, for example. I’ve noticed that, as I’ve felt safer doing certain additional things, I’m able to do more in the city (and philosophically, I guess, be more productive). Anyway, an interesting realization of an abstract lesson that I’ve been thinking about.
Anyway, got to head to bed to wake up and tell the moto driver that I don’t need a ride at 7:00 tomorrow since my next commitment at school isn’t until Wed afternoon.
Unfortunately, both my first post and this one aren’t being posted when they were written because, for some reason, I can’t connect to the internet today or last night, but assumingly, if you’re reading them now, then it’s all been taken care of.