Disclaimer: I am not politically-minded, and these are not well-planned thoughts, just musings. Please take this with a grain of salt.

I feel really far from the Occupy movement.

Part of that is because I am really far from the Occupy movement, geographically, anyway. Cambodia is 12 time zones from the east coast of the US, and 15 (or 9 minus a day) from my native California.

Part of that is because I don’t follow politics much anyway even when they are happening around me. So I know that I can’t offer a good opinion on this issue, and thus…

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The last time I posted about teaching, I was only two days on the job. Now, I’ve taught at People Improvement Organization’s school in the Stung MeanChey district of Phnom Penh, next to the former rubbish dump¹ outside of the city proper, for over two months.

And a lot has happened in those two months, so I’m not going to do a “typical day” thing, like I did for living with my host family. When I set out to write this post, I thought I would break it into sections based on the four (!) different classes I’ve taught now. But then I realized that to understand that, you’d need a history of why I’ve been shuffled around so much.

So that’s what this post is, and next week or the week after I’ll post about the actual teaching.

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A couple people have already asked about how teaching’s going, so I really should have written about that this week. But I really want to get the series on the Khmer language tied up, even though I’ve sadly been pretty stagnant in learning new words and new grammar patterns in the last month. Will have to figure out how to turn that around…maybe a regular class is the best way, despite feeling quite busy.

This last language section is on syntax, or grammar; how sentences are put together. And it turns out there’s not too much to say; Khmer syntax is fairly simple and will feel familiar to anyone who speaks, say, English, Spanish, or Chinese.

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