Language Lessons

Today’s lesson started out with this exchange:

“Mr. Sophea, how do you say poop?”
“Put?”
“No, poop. Like if you go to the bathroom and you don’t pee…but you poop.”
“Oh. You mean shit?”

Yes, I meant shit. But, I told my tutor, Mr. Sophea, that in America, saying “shit” is very impolite. A more polite way to say it would be “defecate”. He seemed confused, and asked me to spell it. I did, and he wrote it on the board. “Dee-fee-cate,” he said. “Where does that word come from?”

“Feces,” was my immediate reply. “It’s another polite way to say shit, the noun. Defecate is when you’re removing feces from something…like shitting.”

He asked me to spell it, and subsequently put that on the board too. “Now what did you say before I said shit?”

“You mean poop? P-O-O-P.”

That went on the board too. Nearly 10 minutes had gone by, and all that was on the board were the words defecate, feces, and poop. In this, essentially, lay the beauty of self-directed language lessons.

One of my first priorities upon arriving at site was securing a language tutor. I knew that nothing really substantial in terms of my primary project was really going to take off during the first three months, especially given that our explicit instruction was to “observe”, and I needed language lessons in order to maintain a productive schedule (i.e. one that involves things other than laying in a hammock for a good chunk of my waking hours). Finding a tutor was really not a big deal; once my little sister gave me the official tour of the community, I scouted out some potential candidates and eventually settled on Mr. Sophea, the guy that teaches private English lessons to the neighborhood children, including my host sister and brother.

It wasn’t hard to get him to agree to teach me Khmer; he was pretty keen on having such close access to a native English speaker so that he himself could improve his English. I also took to showing up to his afternoon classes and speaking some English with the more advanced students there, and he appreciated it, so numbers were exchanged and Peace Corps was contacted (we were told to not do any of the wage-bargaining with any language tutors, and that everything would be handled by Peace Corps, including a proficiency interview). A few days later, Dara, the language coordinator, called me back and told me that he agreed to pay Mr. Sophea $3 an hour even though his day job is not actually a teacher but a policeman. “Don’t worry,” Dara said, “At least you’ll be safe.”

And so lessons started, following a curriculum I set up completely on my own. $3 an hour may seem like a petty fee in America, but in Cambodia, it goes a long way. Consider this: my family gets paid $100 a month to feed me two meals a day and put me up in their home. In addition, because they are such kind people, they give me all sorts of snacks and amenities (mattress—a real one, mosquito net, etc) and are always willing to help if I have trouble with anything. I pay around 50 cents to eat breakfast every day. Their outrage is understood, then, when I accidentally let slip that Peace Corps was paying Mr. Sophea, $3 an hour.

“$3 an hour? So if you go to Mr. Sophea for 30 days out of the month you would be paying him nearly as much as you pay Ma, who feeds you and takes care of you? And for what, for him to teach you the alphabet? Your little sister can teach you the alphabet.”

If you ever thought dealing with motherly guilt was difficult in the States, in English (or Chinese), your native language, you have no idea what it feels like to be barraged with that guilt in another country and another language. There was really nothing I could do, either, because it wasn’t I who decided to pay him the $3.

I took a few days to mull this over and eventually decided that I wouldn’t make going to Mr. Sophea’s house a regular thing, maybe only once or twice week, for grammar and vocabulary help. Nobody can deny that Mr. Sophea’s English is far better than any of the other teachers at the school, and I was able to explain to them that if I had questions about anything slightly complicated, Mr. Sophea would be best able to answer them. Simple stuff like the alphabet I could learn from anyone else. They seemed to understand, and appreciated my efforts in dealing with the issue, so today I headed out for my fourth lesson.

It was, as per usual, time well spent. After going over various ways to say “disturb” and using them in sentences, Mr. Sophea pauses. “That last one, ‘gaw-goh’,” he says, “is also the name of a popular Cambodian soup. So maybe you should not use it as much as the other ones. People will think you are talking about soup.”