On Sunday last week, we did community service and we made some tables for an English school which is located at Bakong District. We also had a clean up around this school with the students who study here!!
Salas started her free education at home since 2013 with one class after her full day teaching at another school. In April 2016, there was a group of foreigners who took a tour in her area and they saw her school by accident. They asked some information about her free education and a few months later, they came back again and asked Salas, if they could build two classes for her and Salas was very happy because she did not have enough room for all the students.
Right now Salas has 267 students and the number of students keeps increasing everyday because they do not have school around there in the evening. The reason why students need to study English in the evening because in the day time, most students are studying at Government school and they do not have time to study English.
There are 4 teachers at Salas's free school, Mr. Voan, Salas's brother-in- law, Salas's husband, and herself. They do not get paid but this is what they do for their community and they love to do it. They work for themselves in the daytime and come back home in the evening and then they spend from 5 to 9pm with all students.
There are 267 students now and they divided into 5 levels.
1. New Heavy Elementary Level = 45 students - 8 - 9pm
2. New Heavy Beginner Level = 63 students - 6 - 7pm
3. Family & Friends 1 Level = 62 students - 8 - 9pm
4. ABC Beginner Level = 120 students (2 classes) - 5 - 6pm
5. Thai class - teaches by Salas's husband = 20 students - 6 - 7pm
We left our office at early to 7:00 in the morning. It was about 7:30 we arrived Nak’s house and we had breakfast until 8:15 we left Nak’s house and start our work. This time we also had some foreigner volunteer join with us! The first group is the Philip's team which found out about our work at Project Y's and the second is Suke's Japanese team.
Before we start our work, we thought we would complete our work at 11:00 am but this was our first time making tables so it took a little bit longer then we thought. We finished at around 1:30pm and we had made 6 tables!! We learnt a lot from this experience because it was the first time for all of us to build these tables. Next time we do an activity like this we will be much faster.
We cleaned up the school with the students and exaplaiend to them why it is important to look after their school and environment. We will also follow up with them next month to make sure they are cleaning and taking care of the area. We had lunch at Nak's family house and left Bakong to go back to Siem Reap at 3pm.
