Hello again, friends! I hope you are all doing well. Life here in Phnom Penh keeps rolling right along as the mid-point of my time here is quickly approaching. Unbelievable. Since I last wrote, I have been to two weddings, watched my students role-play some entertaining restaurant scenes, edited innumerable entries in a guide to the trees of RUA's campus, listened to several graduate students defend their theses, and spent some quality time with other MCC expats doing very un-Cambodian things such as playing ping-pong, eating cheese, and watching Ace Ventura. Good times all around. Sometime soon I'm hoping to get photos up from the weddings and Angkor Wat, among other things, but that has to wait until I find time to get to a fast internet cafe. For now, here are some of my favorite excerpts from my students' writing. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

From self-introduction speeches:

"Someday, I want to go for a walk around the world."

"My dream is to go to law school and I want to be a lawyer, especially I want to be a doctor and I want to work in the bank."

From accounts of their experience studying English:

"Well, I know English a little, but I am very happy, when teacher order me write Assignment English. I am going to struggle."

"I studied grammar when I was a genius in high school."

"In my life I have one wish. My wish is want to know about English."

"I'm very and very happy because of I have chance to study with foreign English teacher. I think that I have very luck."

"Beside my Bd.E class, I also have another at RUA which is touch by a cute American lecturer."

From a paragraph about a gift they gave:

"I wrote that wish you have a good health, pass all your exam and have a good dream and wish you become a pig soon, because my friend liked to sleep when she went to school."

"thanks teacher very much I know have alot of mistake, but I try to corect it. bye! Erin!"

From an essay on criminal justice:

"It is very hard to say that criminals were wrong, if we try to understand the curriculum vitae of them."

"...stomach glowing of hungry..."

"As a result everything we are supposed to achieve, will come true, development and efficiency forever."

"Living in poverty, without education and unskill is very disaster."

From homework questions:

8. Can most birds smell?
"No. The government says the people cannot kill kiwis."

"Object D is a strangle plate of sickness 12 cm."
(Correctly read: Object D is a triangular plate of thickness 12 cm.

From midterm reflections on English class:

"And I undersatnd that it can beef up my English is improve."

"However, studying English it makes me have knowledge to lead my lives happiness."

"Human being always feels to like, and dislike someone and something. These are waht nature provided them since their birthes. It is the reason why I like my teacher, Erin Gotwals, and my classmats in English class."

"I feel inconvenient when sitting on the chair in English class and the whole chairs in my university also."

From a scholarship application essay on Cambodia's future development and their role in it:

"Finally, I'd like to donate myself as a part of Cambodia's future development. I love you and I'd like to see you developed and powerful in the world, Cambodia."

"They can teach to descendants don't unknow or stupide."

"I want to be a human resourse really."

"Cambodia is a developing country which have just escaped from a genius war."

"And especially the government should try to get rit out the netural disaster that effect to the agricultur."

"If we must communicate many guest to visit our country. But we have to prepare such as: make a lot of happy place every province."

"The never an only exciting a lives. the likes frakfhurst a morning and evening. you to home long, too. you little public a late."
(He didn't get the scholarship, by the way.)

"So in name is is student i should study hard and supporting something is the our contries love nation."

"We make people have good idea in plant, use of material like shit of cow, shit of pig, etc. that use in farm or in rice fields."

"I will get unviolence to solve the face-problem everytime."

"And finishes. I'm very happy when I write the text."

Indeed. And so, of course, am I.

Hello again! New Year's resolution: to write something here at least every two weeks. There, it's written down. No excuses now. I hope you are all doing well, and not having too hard a time adjusting to the daily grind of work and school after the holiday season. I didn't have to worry about that here, seeing as there was no holiday season, except for the Internat'l New Year. Even though there are more holidays in Cambodia than anywhere else I've ever lived, Christmas is not one of them. Logical enough, since the Christian population here is about 1%. I actually taught class on Christmas day, but then I took the next three days off for a trip to Siem Reap, the home of Angkor Wat (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) and countless other incredible temples and ruins, with the Hoovers, who are friends of mine from the States, who came to visit Seiha, my Cambodian friend and MCC coworker, who spent a year in the States living at their house. How's that for a confusing run-on sentence? If one of my students handed that in, I would tell her to split it into at least three separate sentences. Since I am a lecturer, though, I can do whatever I want. And that is a perfect segue into the real content of this post.

Several weeks (or months?)ago, I wrote about what teaching was like on a bad day and promised that a parallel entry on the good points would be soon to follow. Needless to say, this is a little late, but that is due to my own tendency toward procrastination and not to the lack of good things about my job. Here are some of my favorites.

I get to teach barefoot. No kidding! Even at Goshen, professors don't get to do that. Here, no one's allowed to wear shoes in the classrooms because it makes the floor dirty, especially during the rainy season. When I get a teaching job back in North America, I'll have to see if I can convince the administration that teaching with shoes on goes against my culture. Too bad I don't look Cambodian.

My students are wonderful. Not necessarily wonderful students, but wonderful people. They always smile and say, "Hello, teacher! How are you? Did you eat rice yet?" when they see me around campus. Well, the ones whose English isn't that good at least smile. And most of them are thrilled to have a foreign English teacher. Especially a young single female one. Actually, that should go on the list of my least favorite things about teaching here, but it does provide some quality entertainment at times.

More on my students. They're truly interested in learning about cultural differences between Cambodia and North America. (You mean you only eat rice once or twice a week? And you get kicked out of school for handing in someone else's writing as your own? And you can't tell people they're fat or ask them how much money they make?) I love teaching language because it's so much deeper than the grammar and vocabulary. It's teaching culture, it's teaching openmindedness, it's teaching worldviews. And I learn as much from them as they learn from me.

They keep me on my toes intellectually, especially the ones in my upper-level classes. What is the difference between robbery and theft, anyway? When do you use definite and indefinte articles? (Khmer doesn't have them.) Why don't "I don't really want to go" and "I really don't want to go" mean the same thing? What's the difference between mix, combine, and integrate? I should've learned by now to start carrying around my dictionary.

They write and say some pretty hilarious things, too, in not-quite-perfect English. I keep a list of my favorites on my desk for some comic relief when things get rough. One of these days I'll post some of them for your reading pleasure. For the time being, here's one of the year's best from one of Sarah's students: "Teacher, teacher, I have to strongly piss!" Yes, time for a mini culture lesson on appropriate vocabulary.

Apart from the students, some of my Khmer coworkers have been a good time as well. I can't say I know many of them well, since the four of us expats seconded to RUA from MCC share our office with only one Khmer English teacher, but I've really appreciated the connections with the ones I've gotten to know a little bit. It made a huge difference once some of them discovered that I do indeed speak Khmer, enough for casual conversation, if not for deep discussions about our common profession. I'm hoping for more of that in the future.

That is a far from comprehensive list of all the things I enjoy about teaching at RUA, but for now it'll have to do. It's now time for me to leave on a weekend trip to a wedding out in a village in one of the provinces. I don't know quite what to expect, and that's the way I like it. Never a dull moment. Maybe next time you'll get to hear about it. Until then, take care, and I would love to hear how life is treating all of you in your corners of the world. Lie sen haoy!

Hello, my dear friends, and, as all the Cambodians say, happy merry Christmas to you! A little late, I know. Happy International New Year as well. This has been a very busy month, but that's not a good excuse for me not writing. There's been much more happening here than I can hope to catch up on, but I will at least put one piece of it here since it's already written. This is actually something I had written to send back to my church at home, but here it is for you as well, if you have any interest. Just a glimpse into some of the things I've been thinking about lately. Observing the effects of Christianity (and the Western culture it's inextricably intertwined with) in a Buddhist country has been the source of a whole lot of theological tension for me, but this is not the time or the place to get into that. For now, here's the moto story for you.

When Jody asked me a few weeks ago if I’d be willing to write about a specific circumstance in which I experienced God’s care and protection, I started thinking through my collection of adventure stories for a good one to share. A number of potentially dangerous situations with surprisingly fortunate outcomes came to mind—sobering experiences that made me stop and appreciate how precious life really is. Yes, I thought, I could tell one of those stories. But were they really instances in which I truly experienced God’s protection? Perhaps I did experience it—perhaps God really was there protecting me. But did I ever fully recognize that protection? To be perfectly honest, I had never given it much consideration. No matter. I could doctor the story up a little for a church audience and tell it as if I had been conscious of God’s presence with me all along. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Tell the stories so they fit what we want to believe.

God’s protection. It sounds good. I could use that explanation to rationalize the happy ending of one of my stories. But I could also explain it a lot of other ways. Luck. Chance. Fate. Coincidence. Destiny. Karma—the rewards and punishments for my actions in a previous life, according to the theology of my Buddhist neighbors. I could even write it off to my own intelligence, or stupidity. Sticking God into the story as an afterthought to make it sound more impressive wasn’t what I was looking for. I opted to keep thinking it over and to stay on the lookout for situations demonstrating God’s care for me.

A few days later, I was coming back into the city of Phnom Penh after a day of teaching. Amy, one of my fellow MCCers, was driving our motorbike, and I, like a good Cambodian woman, was sitting sidesaddle on the back. Halfway home, as we were passing another moto, he came up on a bike on his right-hand side and moved left to avoid it—right into our path. Amy couldn’t move out of his way without hitting an oncoming car in the opposite lane. Our motos hit, and we both lost control. The next thing I knew, my head was slamming against the ground, and I was lying on my back in the dirt on the opposite side of the road. Thinking, “That should’ve hurt a whole lot more than it just did.” Thinking, “If I hadn’t been wearing this helmet, I wouldn’t be able to just get up and walk away right now.”

But I did—a little shaken, but otherwise no worse for the wear than a few bruises, a little blood, and a lot of dirt. Amy and the other moto driver seemed to be fine as well, and after several minutes of assuring each other that everyone, incredibly enough, was more or less alright, we pulled our banged-up moto out of the dirt and continued on our way.

As I sat there the second time, I kept thinking about how lucky we were. Lucky I was wearing my helmet, wasn’t it? Lucky there was no oncoming traffic the moment we swerved through the other lane. Lucky I was wearing a skirt and sitting sideways so my leg didn’t get trapped under the moto as it fell. Lucky we landed in the dirt and not on the pavement. Yeah, it was lucky. It was fate. It was us being prepared and remaining calm in the heat of the moment. Who am I kidding? It wasn’t us. It was something else protecting us.

I had been looking for a case of God’s protection, and here I had one. What more could I want? If I hadn’t been thinking about it ahead of time, would it have crossed my mind? Maybe not. I’m sure I’ve experienced God’s care countless times before without recognizing it, but receiving that protection and consciously acknowledging it are two very different things. We all tend to find what we’re looking for. We tell the stories so they make sense to us somehow. I was looking for protection, and I found it. I can’t prove that’s what kept us safe. There’s no hard evidence. And at some point, that’s not what matters. God’s presence in this story—in any story—isn’t something to be proven. It’s a choice to be made. If I can tell the story with God or with luck, and neither version can be proved right or wrong, I choose to tell it with God. It keeps me humble. It keeps me amazed at the miracle of life. It keeps me wondering what else I might find if I start looking for it.