HOW IT WORKS

Above-My wife Kheang talking before her evening beginning English class to a high school teacher and two junior high students. There are two classes a 12-1pm class and and a 4:30-5:30 pm class. They all meet on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Our guests are encouraged to participate in non-directed group discussions.

There is a large demand for quality English teachers in our village. The reason is simple; the village and its way of life is under tremendous financial pressure. Lucky is the villager who can break even. Huge tracts of land are being lost to urban "developers", who buy the land cheap and usually start a megabucks enterprise, not infrequently a brickyard. When my wife and I first moved to her home village, there were three brick yards betweeen our house and Kampong Cham. There are now fifteen. As a result, more and more villagers want to pursue better-paying jobs, preferably ones which do not involve higher education and its related expenses.
Here is one example. One of our students Bun Nat has a sister who works in a casino in Poipet. She can get him a job as a card dealer if he can speak English. Now this might not sound like a goal you would have pursued in university, but I can assure you it beats looking at the South end of a water buffalo walking North all day long.

We have also had three students who studied English so that they could join their overseas husbands-Cambodian men who have lived and worked in The US for years.

I also wish to add that we have absolutely no affiliations. We are trying to help our fellow villagers secure a brighter future; we don't save souls in the name of anyone and we adopt an apolitical approach in our methodology which is interactive. In other words, we want them to talk with each other and not memorize lists of words or regurgitate grammar. More importantly, under no circumstances do we try to change their cultural beliefs or attack their culture. Cambodian problems must be identified by Cambodians and solved by them, not by "foreign experts".