Touching down to teach in Cambodia: my experience

Lauren & her boyfriend are getting into the swing of teaching English in colourful Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Keep up with her TEFL journey here!

My boyfriend and I booked a flight to South America in March 2015 with the intent to head to Lima, Peru for a month of travelling before trying to land a TEFL teaching job in Santiago, Chile. Our first step on the TEFL road was to purchase a 120-hour online course with an additional 20 hours of practical classroom training. Even with the best intent and driven with a passion that had lasted for as long as we could remember, we were unsettled to think of ourselves in only a short amount of time being a paid teacher without previous teaching experience. We quickly reviewed our itinerary and booked onto an internship for eight weeks in Cambodia, along with a change of flights that enabled us to fly to SE Asia and then continue on to South America after the internship finishes.

We are two weeks into the internship and are still feeling remnants of being overwhelmed with being a TEFL teacher but with the support that we have received from the in country co-ordinators, we have managed to begin to feel in control. The internship already has proved to be the best decision that we have made and a vital part in our learning. There are so many questions that family and friends ask when I call back home, What food do you eat? Where do you live? What are the people like? all of the questions that rattled around our heads when we tried to envisage our life in Cambodia. Our accommodation is on the school grounds at an International school, however George and I actually teach in a different branch which is located about a twenty minute tuk tuk drive in another part of Phnom Penh. We both feel that our experience here is enriched by living in a suburb of the city with locals and getting to see the same friendly faces every day.

There is a sense of community that is evident in the men in the street playing cards, to the lady who sells us our morning coffees from a road side eatery, who always remembers that we want no sugar and a little milk. Here we have begun to realise that the small things really amount and we have instantly valued them more, having never lived in a developing country. The food here is a juxtaposition of exotic to (honestly) quite boring. The staple of the countries cuisine is rice and the second is noodles which after eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner can become somewhat painful to eat. We have a toaster in our room so after our 5.30am alarm we try and force a piece of toast down and George normally buys street food for a mid-morning snack which in Cambodia is best to find somewhere that is popular with the locals.

Our feelings after a few days observing Khmer teachers and teaching a handle of lessons is that the teaching part is surprisingly the thing that we have quickly grown accustomed to. The factors that we are finding the most difficult is the bureaucracy in Cambodia; we were told in our orientation to have a ‘cool heart’ and the Cambodian way is to smile even when there is tension. The culture differences here in comparison to the West are vast and it may take a little longer to settle into the Cambodian way of managing things a little longer than we expected.