Mural Painting

Day 6 (28 May 2014) and pass the half way mark of our trip.

These 6 days we have been working closely with the construction workers as well as the primary school students and our classroom is finally near completion! Today we could finally start on designing and painting of the wall murals.

The almost complete classroom

Bearing in the mind that the classroom would be used for pre-school children (age 4 – 6), we decided to focus our attentions on designing a wall that the young children could use to learn numbers and alphabets.

 We first had to draw out the design using chalk and pencil. Following which the students worked in groups to start filling in the colours. They certainly developed a lot of patience as to paint a nice picture; they had to be careful and meticulous. Being impatient often resulted in the paint dripping down and spoiling the paintings.

Our Alphabets Wall – Outline drawn by April

Bringing colour to the Numbers Wall

Our students later spent some time playing and interacting with the primary school students. Everyone had a lot of fun! By now, they all have a special friend or two that they are close with and it’s very interesting to see how they communicate with a mix of gestures, simple Cambodian phrases and English phrases.

Jasmine surrounded by her new found friends

Teng Wei (15 years old), Chien (14 years old)

Reflections:

“Our leaders think about the future, what our country needs and they make sure we are up to date with what the economy needs and this helps improve our country. Here in Cambodia, economy is not very strong and not much thought put into the education of the children, their education is not very recognized and a lot of them not able to do anything with their education certificates” – Donovan, 3A6

“Even though we are very close in age, we are very different in terms of our height and built. They are much smaller and are almost like the size of our Primary 3 or 4 students. But even though we are bigger in size, though all the work I realise that they are physically stronger and fitter than we are. They are not afraid to do anything (courageous) and in some ways they are much better than us and we can learn from them. For example, when it came to nailing of wood and shovelling of soil etc, they are more skilful and do a better job than us!” – Teng Wei, 3A4

“They always show a very bright smile when we are playing with them. When we are with them, we share games we play in Singapore with them and they share with us some games that they play in Cambodia.  I feel that they always look forward to us coming down to the project site. I think that their lives might be monotonous. I just think when we leave who is going to give attention to them?” – Alzac, 3A3