The question: What challenges have you faced in your project or in other areas of your Peace Corps experience?
This year has been particularly challenging. I’ve struggled with the work at the school (teaching as well as other projects), with my relationships with HCNs, and with personal anxiety.
Coteaching relationships are hard enough, but they’re made harder when sites are selected based on which schools are willing to take us and not on which schools want us for specific purposes. My school and counterparts seem to view me as an interesting addition, someone to take part of their work load and be a beneficial line on their CVs. They want me to teach when they don’t want to come, grade the tests so they don’t have to, and give them interesting anecdotes to share about working with the foreigner girl. (I do have good relationships with several teachers at the school and there are many positive experiences there, but I want to emphasize here some the negatives and how those difficulties have been affecting me.) No one has interest in extra work; no one wants to prepare outside resources, to meet with me outside of class to develop lesson plans, to change their teaching habits in the long term. We both show up each day and follow the EFC by rote. And a lot of that is my fault. I’m not good at confrontation, at pointing out flaws. And I’m too easily paralyzed by the extent of interwoven problems in the Cambodian education system. I find respite in the class I teach alone; it’s in that environment that I can try new things and treat the students differently from the norm. Those are the students who are learning and improving and excited to come to class. So I’ve taken those ideas and methods and tried to implement them in my other classes and show them to my coteachers. They aren’t taken. Either the teachers aren’t interested enough to spend the time to understand my idea or they don’t care enough to implement it when I’m not in the class. I feel like any changes in behavior are meant solely to appease me.
I’m also struggling with the director and the school system in general. Yesterday I sat down with the director to discuss how we could apply for a grant to improve the reading room. He wanted to tell me what the project required and leave it at that. I tried to explain the plethora of details that went into the proposal, but he wasn’t interested in that sort of preparation work. He showed me a number, saying ‘This is the amount we need to do the project. I don’t care how you do the proposal, just get this amount.’ This reaction harkens back to the mini-IST we had in which our directors and counterparts participated and we had time for us to discuss action plans for our service. Every idea proposed by my director involved the receipt of funds from my ‘rich’ American friends and family. He even wanted me to build a road. I don’t know how to be here under a teaching framework when it’s not my teaching that the school wants from me. I’m not fulfilling anyone’s expectations for my time here, not even my own.
Ever since reading Somaly Mam’s The Road of Lost Innocence, I’ve been really struggling with some aspects of life and culture here. I don’t know how to act around teachers who coyly admit to frequenting karaoke bars for the wonderful ‘service’ and ‘company.’ I don’t know how to act around my director who regularly participates in the culture of bribery. I don’t know how to act around my brother-in-law who frequently drinks until he vomits the entirety of the following morning. I don’t know how to act around my male family members who think that married men are still entitled to be with multiple women. I don’t know what to do when I see a man taking advantage of a drunken girl and the response is that she shouldn’t have been drinking around men. I feel lost here. I feel like I’m sitting on the sidelines and observing tragedy.
A lot of the above have been contributing to feelings of helplessness and powerlessness that have been overwhelming me lately. As much as I love my host family and how they care for me, I have no control or responsibility for my own life. I don’t go to the market, cook, or clean. Every aspect of my day is prepared for me. I’m an extremely overgrown child. Since I don’t have control over the society I’m in, I need to find a way to take some control over myself.
I’ve started contemplating action plans to begin to approach proactively some of these challenges, so I hope things will begin to change and that I’ll feel more at ease soon.
(posted March 21, 2013)
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