Jammies as Outerwear

We went to two schools. The first, a large complex with several classrooms; the second in a village. At the larger school, I met Em, who is a computer teacher there. The computer lab was filled with mid-nineties computers. He teaches his students Word and PowerPoint. No internet, no wireless, no laptops, just old computers. He said that they had to pay officials a "commission" to get them into the country. The donor was from Singapore (point in fact: Singapore has higher per capita income than U.S.)

The second school is in a village. To get to the village, you need to ride through the ruins of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. Along the way are tourists, monkeys carrying babies, and local tourists --20 standing in the back of a truck.

The villages are poor. Bamboo huts, some on stilts, with an open area up front for lounging and eating. Maybe 50 children come for art class. We do an English lesson first, and a Japanese lesson, and then we pass out food. Apparently the kids are all hungry. I found out later, that the first group of kids who got food were the ones who came just for the food. For a time, they had 80 students in class, but it turned out that many of them came for the food only. So they feed them first, those kids go off to eat, and the rest have their art lesson.

The kids all knew some English and we talked about their paintings. The assignment was to draw something they enjoy. All of them drew pictures of fishing (with many fish in the water), with a vegetable garden on the side.

The kids had bad teeth. Some were rotted out (this is a 12-year-old), others were just dirty, really dirty. They mostly wore American clothes, some dirty and ripped, but covered with English phrases. The most interesting trend was the use of jammies as day wear. These are the flannel, warm cuddly kind that we wear in the winter. Check ot the woman in her jammies riding her bike in the photos. The children, aged four to twelve were all very sweet and friendly.