Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Cambodia
Cambodia
I ended up in Cambodia for a brief working stay when I was
invited to be the keynote speaker at CamTesol. I did not stay long enough to
make lasting friendships, as I did in many countries, or to get much of an
impression of the country (other than through reading and tourist brochures)
beyond the capital. So, my memories of the county are episodic, incomplete.
Nonetheless, I found meaning in the time I was there.
Mekong River
I don’t remember with whom I spent a couple of relaxing
hours at a restaurant on the Mekong River outside Phnom Penh. I just remember a
pleasant conversation and a sense of great relaxation, feeling as lazy as the
river itself.
The Mekong River, stretching from the Tibetan Plateau
through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, is Southeast
Asia’s lifeline—a vast, slow-moving artery that nourishes millions. Its
character is defined by breadth and patience: in places, the Mekong sprawls
over two kilometers wide, its silty waters unfurling in lazy meanders that
carve fertile floodplains and floating forests. Unlike the Amazon, which dwarfs
nearly all rivers, the Mekong’s scale felt more intimate yet equally
majestic—its expanse shaped by rhythm rather than magnitude, a river that seemed
to breathe rather than rush.
In that, it brought me from my rushed trip and rushed to a
place of peace. I felt myself absorbing its patience (not an inherent trait for
me), and I noticed that my dinner companion did the same. It was indeed one of
the gentlest dinners I have ever had.
Phnom Penh
By way of contrast, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia’s restless capital, hummed with a rhythm
that felt both improvised and unstoppable. The city’s arteries were crowded
with tuk‑tuks — the motorcycle‑pulled carriages that everyone called by their
onomatopoetic nickname, a word that seemed to capture both the sputter of the
engine and the jostling of the ride. These open‑air trailers, often painted in
bright reds and greens, wove through traffic with a kind of chaotic grace,
their drivers leaning into turns as exhaust mingled with the scent of street‑side
noodles and burning incense. A tuk‑tuk was more than transport; it stood as a
symbol of Phnom Penh’s ingenuity, an adaptation born of necessity and sustained by
the city’s appetite for motion.
Long before COVID‑19, nearly everyone on the street wore a
mask — not as a public‑health precaution but as a basic survival tool. The air
was thick with particulate matter, a visible haze that settled over boulevards
and markets, making it difficult to breathe comfortably for more than a few
minutes at a time. Drivers wrapped scarves around their faces; vendors tied
cloth masks beneath their chins; schoolchildren walked in small clusters, each
one masked against the dust and exhaust. It was simply part of life, an
unspoken acknowledgment of the city’s environmental reality.
The streets themselves were a study in contrasts: gleaming
high‑rises casting shadows over fading colonial façades, monks in saffron robes
crossing boulevards lined with cafés, phone shops, and vendors selling iced
coffee sweetened with condensed milk. The air carried the pulse of commerce and
conversation, punctuated by the whine of engines and the laughter of families
gathered around steaming bowls of kuy teav. Phnom Penh’s culture thrived on this collision of old and new — its people
balancing reverence for tradition with a restless drive toward modernity.
Beneath the bustle lay a deep resilience, a collective memory of rebuilding
after loss, and a pride in the city’s ability to reinvent itself again and
again.
To ride through Phnom Penh
in a tuk‑tuk was to experience the city’s heartbeat firsthand: the blur of
markets, the shimmer of the Tonlé Sap
River, the constant negotiation between speed and stillness. Every ride felt
like a small act of survival and celebration, a reminder that the city moved
not in straight lines but in improvisations — always adapting, always pressing
forward.
TESOL/CamTESOL
TESOL is the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages, an international umbrella for language‑teaching practice, research,
and professional development. CamTESOL is Cambodia’s major annual TESOL
conference, hosted in Phnom Penh, bringing together teachers, researchers, and
policymakers from across Southeast Asia and beyond. In essence, TESOL is the
global discipline, and CamTESOL is one of its vibrant regional hubs — a place
where Cambodia’s educators connected with the wider world of English‑language
teaching.
I have done a lot of work over the years with various
regional hubs. The connection to International TESOL is what helps all these
hubs stay years ahead of the educational system in general in all those places
and stay on an even keel with each other and the larger field.
At the time, task-based instruction was a novelty and
experts sought after. As such an expert, I was asked to keynote CamTesol that
year. I am so glad I accepted. Not only was the keynote well received but also
these teachers displayed openness to new concepts and immediately understood
how to apply them to their own contexts. Throughout the conference, I learned
more from them through their on-the-spot adaptations and sharing of what they
were already doing in their classrooms than they likely learned from my short
presentation. I guess that is what keynoting is all about: sharing and
learning. It was not a one-way stream at CamTesol; it was a wide, meandering
river with room for all kinds of adaptions from which I could drink and take
drinks to other places (though I would never drink Mekong water with all its impossible-to-remove
sediment…just saying; find a picture!)
From the forthcoming book:
Volume 1: ABC Lands
by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver
For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.
For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.
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