My projects in Phnom Penh have diversified and I am now also working with the refugees who have been granted asylum in Cambodia, and those seeking refugee status. This has opened my eyes to a lot of issues surrounding refugee education. While the Montagnard refugees live at one site, and cannot leave without permission and supervision, the other refugee population, called 'urban refugees' live where they choose and have fewer direct provisions made for them. The Montagnards have food baskets delivered to them, whereas the urban refugees have more autonomy and the freedom to work.
The urban refugees that I work with come from Vietnam, Myanmar (both Rohingya and Burmese) Pakistan, and Somalia. I have set up a programme for the women refugees, with the goal of empowering them by fostering a sense of community, as well as local integration, and exploring opportunities for vocational training. Because they live throughout the city, the logistics of meeting with all of them are difficult. There is one place outside Phnom Penh where a relatively large number of the Muslim refugees live, and I have met with some of the women there. One of the central difficulties is communication, and the visits become like the game we used to call 'Chinese whispers' (for politically correct reasons, while teaching I now call it 'Telephone') where a sentence is whispered from one person to the next around the room until the garbled final form is said out loud and compared to its original. My English is translated to Urdu to Burmese to Rohingya and who knows what my original sentences become. Language is a central issue in refugee education, and even more complicated than I knew it to be. Few of the refugees speak Khmer, some because they can get by without it, and some because they are hoping to get to another country, and are unwilling to make the investment in learning a language that won't be of use to them. The kids go to English classes, as it seems all kids in this country do, and then, since English has become a common second language among the refugees, the children who have studied English and picked up Khmer become the family translators and negotiators, putting a lot of pressure on them, and leaving the women dependant on their husbands for money, and their children for communication. My project for empowerment has some way to go.
