🤝 We Enrolled Mey-Yii In Public School 🧑🏫 & I Snuck Into Monkey-B's Classroom 🏫
With each passing day Mey-Yii is becoming more and more of a fixture in our house, so we are glad to finally enroll her in public school.
🛺 The Super Cub Is Now Useless
In Cambodia it is almost impossible to enroll a child in public school if you aren't the guardian or parent, so we arranged to shuttle Mey-Yii and her grandma to school in order to complete this process. Of course, just as I suspected, the woman looked like she had been partying all night, and produced a lame excuse not to ride with us to school in the morning. She gave us Mey-Yii's birth certificate and other relevant paperwork, and asked us to try and do the process on her behalf.
We headed towards the school 5-deep in the tuk-tuk with hopes they would let us enroll her if we said she was an "abandoned child." Luckily this worked, we got Mey-Yii enrolled, well kind of, the school year is over in a few months, so they allowed Mey-Yii to join the Preschool class without formally enrolling. We had hoped they'd let her join 1st grade with Monkey-B, but the class is too full, and this is the tough reality sometimes in Cambodia.
Bitter-Sweet 🤷♂️
The most important thing is we got her in the school system, and now that I will be heading to school with 3 kids instead of 2, dashed are my hopes of my wife learning how to pilot her Super Cub so she can take the kids to school and lessen my daily workload a bit. We are barely in a position to take care of ourselves financially, and although Mey-Yii's grandma could easily afford to provide this sweet little girl a better life, her priorities are alcohol, gambling, cigarettes, and adorning herself with gold.
Almost two hours had passed, and driving an hour back home didn't make sense at this point, so we decided to loiter at the school and do some spying on Monkey-B. The Cambodian school day is only 4 hours long, and as I've spent a lot of time in these school systems, I know that less than an actual hour of what might be called "studying" happens during these 4 hours. We found Monkey-B's classroom unattended because the school was on one of its many "breaktimes." I wasn't thrilled to see Monkey-B seated in between two boys, both of which she told me have a crush on her.
With an hour left in the school day, I took Mey-Yii and my wife over to the police station to start the process of her obtaining a family book, something only available to land-owners, so this will be her first one. I have few rights here as a foreign resident, and even after 12 years of living here and giving myself to this country, I can't even be in my wife's family book, and this basically means our marriage isn't recognized by the government. I would say this makes me feel like a second-class citizen, but citizenship is also something I am not allowed unless I can produce the $300,000 USD price tag like the Chinese are easily able to do.
After we took the first steps in my wife being able to create a family book with both of her daughters' names in it, it was time to head back to school and grab the @kidsisters. We bought Mey-Yii the most basic school supplies, and now my monthly fuel expenses will be more than my monthly Hive earnings because it will be 2,400km traveled per month just taking them to school and back in the tuk-tuk. I can only hope and pray that my $6 to $10 daily Hive earnings will somehow magically be enough.
Mey-Yii now eats two meals a day with us, so this is another added expense, so soon I'll have to stop blogging and try to pursue work in the town where they study, perhaps rent a room there and try to drum up some English classes. I don't want to be away from my family, but after spending several years of massive efforts on Hive, my post payouts still suck because I haven't been blessed by the Hive Illuminati. It's crazy to think I spend up to 12-14 hours a day working my arse off on Hive, but it's the same amount of earnings I'd make teaching an hour a day with time for proper sleep and lots of quality family time.
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Is there an opportunity to teach an hour a day as you say? You should definitely do that! Or find a way to reduce Hive time. Community commitment can create high demands I know.
4 hours a day.. do they even learn anything? Sounds like they would be better off homeschooled. Can't believe you can't get any kind of citizenship by virtue of marriage. Crazy.
The grandmother sounds certainly tough work. What a shame as you could do with her help.
Hopefully the tourism will pick up and your eco spot will bring in better money soon.
Right now there are no teaching opportunities, at least none worth my time. There are so many NGOs that do stuff for free here that Khmers often don't understand that I am just a regular without sponsors who has to earn an income just like them, although with an extra thousand dollars needed for visa/residency bureaucracy things.
I wish the kids could be homeschooled, but I don't read or write Khmer, and am certainly not qualified to teach historical and cultural stuff. Plus they are all different ages, so we'd have to pay three different teachers three separate salaries, plus transportation costs as they'd have to travel an hour or more to reach our house, the logistics and costs would be more than we earn.
Of course I can homeschool in English, no problem. I had thought about opening a private English school originally, with hopes of hiring a Khmer teacher for the back half of the day, but the parent's priorities are drinking, gambling, and smoking cigs, and they won't pay a dollar for education. And also because they are not city folk, they are used to hearing about free English classes offered by an NGO, so they would never pay a fair price for lessons.
I think if the Airbnb is successful, it could allow us enough income to do some kind of educational project, perhaps get an eager youngster from the USA to come over and teach a few hours a day for free rent and food 🤔. Time is the ultimate master, and it's something I never seem to have enough of these days.
REally hoping the air bnb gets sorted.
ARe the drinking gambling Cambodians typical of rural Cambodia or is just where you landed? Sounds like they need to sort their shit out!
Less common in urban areas, but not by much. Even within my in-laws there is gambling addiction, alcoholism, infidelity, and so many more problems. A Cambodian-American mental health expert studied the effects of the war on Cambodians living in the USA, and found that 90% of the folks she encountered suffered from PTSD, even though many of them were second and third generation, often born to parents also born in the USA, but still unable to escape the mental damage caused by the genocide.
Mental health is still not recognized in Cambodian, and as far as I know only 6 beds exist for mental health problems in the whole country. All mental illnesses are basically called "psychosis" in the Cambodian language, so they still haven't even acknowledged mental problems enough to give names for the different forms of it. I personally think this is all to do with how they handled the fallout from the genocide, nobody apologized, nobody was sent to jail, and the perpetrators were allowed to change their clothes and return to civilian life.
Rwanda has a similar history, but they did much better to overcome it because the government set up village tribunals where the killers were made to stand in front of the village, confess their murders and violence, apologize, and create a path forward. Cambodia still has yet to admit any fault, and the government running the country now are basically still the Khmer Rouge, but with a new name.
That is very kindness of you, your help will be your seed of your growth socially, mentally and financially in the future. 😍
I hope so, but most of all if Mey-Yii has a brighter future because of time spent with our family, then I will have no regrets.
Yes, in our country Indonesia is the same, who has the right to register a child to attend school is the biological parent or guardian. But other than that, if someone wants to register a child to go to school, the condition is that the child must have a complete official identity (document), such as a birth certificate and family book. Then the solution is to enter the child's name into the family card of the person who will take care of her to register for school.
Of the four hours of normal learning time at Monkey-B school, but what I understand as you describe only 1 hour of effective study time, it's really not good in my opinion. Where are the teacher and what are they doing?
You and your family are good people my friends, I am sad to read your story that as a foreigner you are considered second class citizens, and for 12 years you have been married and living in Cambodia but still can't make an official family book there. I don't understand the civil registration law there, but I pray to God that all your affairs and your family will be facilitated in managing population administration.. 🙏
Yes, that's true my friend, in the current situation and condition where the price of crypto is falling and the impact of course on the value of our post payments, then it's good for you to start a new job that you have skills there. Teaching English is a good idea, as you said also a day is only 1-2 hours and certainly doesn't take up your daily time. The rest you can still create a blog on Hive and also with your family at home 👍
Have a nice day my kind friend 🙏
The bureaucracy is similar, someone who is not the guardian can enroll a student, but it requires hours of approval, stamps, and interrogation. The teachers in Cambodia often show up late and leave early. Also, there are lots of breaks during the short time they are at school, even a "food break" which is very long. Most of the class time is spent copying things from the chalkboard, and this is a waste of time because the the information is already in their books. The attitude here is copy information and repeat it, but very little critical thinking because the teacher would have to work too hard for that.
I am sad that I will never be recognized here as the husband of my wife and father of our children, but that is the reality, citizenship is now for sale for $300,000 USD, but I know of Chinese nationals who have obtained Khmer citizenship after only a couple of years for $2,500 USD, and they can't even speak the local language. It is obvious who the master of Cambodia is, the CCP. By law I only have to live here 5 years and take a language/history test, but this not the reality because I have tried to go and take this test, but the officials only laugh and me and tell me it will take lots of money.
I am still looking for work, but sometimes I can find Cambodian language students on Reddit. Foreigners will often pay $10/hr to study Khmer online with me. I hope to find a student soon, it will be much-needed income.
Oh my God..that's sad news, but the reality is that nowadays there are many government officials who have openly dared to trade things with "money". In our country it is also almost the same, although not as openly as it is in your country. This is because the mentality of officials is very bad, but is there not a good and honest official there who can help you solve this problem Justin? Btw, why don't you contact the US embassy to help you resolve this issue. Who knows the embassy has a "unique" way to help you 😄
The current world political turmoil is indeed very worrying, the Chinese communist regime is currently expanding its influence to all weak countries, both Africa and Asia. Through the camouflage of its trade and investment schemes by providing long-term debt, China tries to go further and interfere in a country's political problems. And then slowly took control of the country's politics by rearranging elections. That's what I'm learning now, and it's a fact and has happened in African countries like Zimbabwe and more recently in our neighboring Sri Lanka 😩
And I'm afraid the same thing will happen to Cambodia if the officials and politicians in Cambodia are not aware of the dangers of this cruel Chinese communist regime. In our country Indonesia is almost the same, Chinese investment has entered almost all sectors of society. However, there are still many honest politicians, state officials and activists in our country and I hope that doesn't happen in Indonesia.
I pray that you will soon find the job you are looking for and soon find new students for your online classes 🙏
I have never been able to use a US Embassy before, except for one occasion I was allowed to enter in Suriname to protest my family and I being stranded abroad. The USA does very little to help its citizens abroad, and in Suriname they encouraged me to leave my family and head back to the USA without them during the pandemic. The US Embassies only provide passport renewals, marriage registrations, a phone call if we apprehended by local police, and also a $6,000 USD service for sending dead bodies back to the USA, and that's about it.
American citizens aren't even granted entry into embassies abroad unless we meet some of the criteria I mentioned above. China is taking over the world because the CCP works with its citizens. Even here in Cambodia a Chinese citizen can to a Chinese Embassy with a business idea, and if the state likes it, they will provide financial and logistical support. They have already snared many African countries with their debt traps, and I hate to say it's already too late for Cambodia, the CCP already owns most of the Cambodian coastline, and are now building naval bases here.
I hate to pessimistic about the future, but things don't look good for Cambodia.
OMG, that sucks! 😮 When you got married in Suriname, I thought the marriage was supposed to be recognized internationally, even with your not being an official citizen of Cambodia. 😕 Is there anything you could do to have your marriage recognized, or maybe have a second marriage ceremony there in Cambodia?
Does Cambodia have anything akin to a "Green Card" (Permanent Resident Card)? If so, would obtaining something like that help? They make things so hard for folks. 😣
Funny though that we have a Suriname family book, but the kids aren't allowed in it because they weren't born to us in Suriname. Oh the irony, we have a family book of my wife and I together as a family without children, and in Cambodia we have a family book minus me. Money is the master here, and because of the Chinese wave of investment over the last few years, what used to cost hundreds of dollars now costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the tiny redneck town where our daughters study, land is for sale at $10,000 USD per 3 feet regardless of property length/depth.
Cambodians don't believe me when I tell them you can buy a decent mobile home on a good piece of land in Indiana for around $7,000 to $10,000 USD. They simply don't believe it, but many Cambodians work here to save money and buy a house/land in the USA. Comparing California or New York to Cambodia is a different ballgame, but Indiana is definitely a third-world country compared to Cambodia,
I think things will not change in Cambodia during my lifetime, because the opposition party that challenges the ruling party is also racist and xenophobic, and they have had ideas like banning non-Cambodians from many more jobs than we already are. I honestly still hope to end up in Albania one day when it is possible for us all to go together.
Oh, the bureaucracy is insane! 😆 One would think they would want accurate records for correlation with census statistics, at the very least. I had never even heard of a "family book" until Srey-Pov mentioned it one of her blogs, and then you mentioned it later, too. I had to look it up, to learn what it is! 😜 No need to reply to this comment, I'm just rambling... LOL
You are doing a very noble job of helping others pal.
In our place it may not be allowed to turn to anyone else, except their own family.
Thanks my friend, it was very hard to register Mey-Yii, but with a few hours of dialogue, the principal understood the situation and allowed us to place her in the school system.
hello, I'm currently starting to be active again, can I come back to post here, because I didn't make any comments before and I admit that it was wrong. Now I'm back with a new spirit @justinparke
Okay, just remember to do some longform commenting to demonstrate that you actually read posts. ASEAN Hive is all about engagement, whether within our community or elsewhere on Hive, all of our members contribute to the sustainability of Hive.
Thank you, I will of course read the posts there, although I will contribute to the community and also the people here.
First of all, congratulate to Mey-Yii's enrollment. I'm sure this also brings you joy of achievement by successfully put her on education.
And then, I'd like to point out Hive does not really promise you how much they're gonna pay you. In order to join the Illuminati of Hive, you must be a self made whale in the first place, and know how to wipe ass, orgy voting with other whales in order to get your there at the elite club. Or? Be one of those fancy pants(or no pants at all) pretty girl that suck whale dick.
Come back to basic, I guess this isn't that far away from what we'd wished for. I think couple of years back, you'd live a much simpler life, and have more time Hivin than now. Does not have the responsibilities of fixing the property, taking care of the tuk tuk, and hours of commute to and from school. And now what, a neighbor?
Side note, if I'm class mate of monkey-b, I'd sit in front of her and start showing my own quality 🤣
Very classic comment, I can't disagree with any of it. I am truly surprised though by how much our collective delegations are able to boost SE Asian Hive content. I have even seen folks posting SE Asian content in OCD, and I've seen more than once OCD curators recommend our place as a better place to publish their content.
This lets me know that even though we don't directly have whale support, they do have their eyes on posts published in our community due to the standards maintained.
Haha, you're very right, life has changed so much since Suriname, and it still feels like a dream even though we spent three years there. Life is super busy these days, but I'm up for the challenge, and most of it is rewarding in one way or another, although mostly not financially 😁. I can only imagine your sense of humor back in your school days, but I bet it was entertaining for anyone that sat next to you.