Cambodians get in plenty of New Year celebrations every year. First comes Western New Year on January 1. Then there’s Chinese New Year in February. And then Khmer New Year in April. Three chances to make a fresh start, combined with the beginning of spring and a short vacation for our school. It was quite a festive season, with plenty of chances to reflect and recalibrate.

On April 6, Krou Yeung School held a special event for everyone involved with the school, including parents. Just in time, Kimberly finally received her brand new tailor-made teacher’s uniform for which she’d been waiting for quite a while. The occasion was the beginning of Khmer New Year, but the school also decided to combine it with the quarterly awards ceremony, a couple of weeks late after the end of the Second Quarter.

So the ceremony was a bit of a hodgepodge and featured a taekwondo demonstration, a performance of “Cinderella” (which, amazingly, we were not involved in), and… square dancing. Eight students, representing grades 3 through 6, participated in a performance to an instrumental version of “Boil Them Cabbage Down”, which Kimberly had choreographed. Dennis served as the caller.

Despite being a bit ahead of the beat (the dancers knew the sequence a little too well, and were too eager to move to the next part), the performance went quite well. And the students managed to find some suitably Western-looking attire in their closets.

There was also a “fashion show”, with the students modeling various forms of Cambodian clothing, from the traditional to the not-so-traditional. Amazingly, this even included the somewhat uniform black garb of the Khmer Rouge, which one boy sported while holding a toy machine gun on a girl representing his prisoner. We are a bit taken aback to see such a light-hearted depiction of the brutally genocidal regime that devastated the nation a mere half-century earlier. To kids, of course, that span of time is forever ago; but some of the adults present were surely old enough to remember it all too well. And the cavalier attitude toward it seems to us somewhat akin to a Jewish school in the Nineties spoofing the Nazis and the Holocaust. A sense of humor is a great thing, But still.

Khmer New Year is a 4-day celebration (April 13-16, 2024) during which schools and many businesses are closed. Our school observed the festival by giving students a 10-day “small vacation” (wakan toi), as opposed to the “large vacation” (wakan tum) between school years. Teachers, however, got only about half as much time off.

Since it’s traditional to wear new clothes at this time, generally white tops and black bottoms, we’d bought some traditional attire just for the occasion at a shop in Psaa Tuol Tompong ( known as “Russian Market”). These New Year’s outfits are generally white on the top and black on the bottom, adorned by a festive scarf on both genders.

The pants men wear are looser than the ethics code in Washington, and appear at first blush to be big enough for three or four guys, even if they’re not particularly good friends. But they wrap around the waist in a specific and rather tricky manner; and while they still end up being baggier than a melting walrus, they at least don’t fall off. Still, Dennis felt so awkward in them that he ultimately decided to fudge the bottom half and just go with his black American slacks.

On Monday there were no classes, but the students still came to school — at least those who had not already left town to visit relatives in the provinces. There was a big party with food and games, and a blessing ceremony by three visiting Buddhist monks. A few of the teachers were seated in front, before the monks; and the school principal, ever eager to include us foreigners, insisted that Dennis come and join them. (Kimberly was invited too, but she was wearing her “Pre-School Teacher Hat” that day and had her hands full of little ones to attend to.) There is evidently a certain protocol to exactly how you sit in front of a Buddhist monk, in a position that entails tucking one knee under you and extending the other out to the side in a manner that gets to be quite uncomfortable after a while. Maybe the monks are the only ones who are supposed to feel comfortable.

On Tuesday there were no students, but the teachers and staff had to come in for a morning of “reflection” — which basically meant three hours of speeches in Khmer. And we didn’t consistently have translator, so we often didn’t even know what we were supposed to be reflecting on.

In the afternoon, and into the evening, there was a party for teachers that turned out to be rather fun, despite its inauspicious beginning — we started out standing in formation, like students perking to attention before classes in the morning. Kimberly, along with the other kindergarten teachers, donned traditional accessorization and performed a little story pageant along with a traditional dance. It involved a maiden breaking a bowl, which we gather was supposed to represent the loss of virginity. There were other skits — in Khmer, so we only could guess what was being said, but they evoked a great deal of laughter — as well as party games that had everyone cracking up.

Then on Wednesday, it was back for more “reflection”. But this time the speeches dragged on for almost an entire day. The exception was that we had a one-hour breakout session in which each department was supposed to brainstorm ideas to help foster discipline and respect, etc. among students. And then we’d reconvene and report what we came up with. Sounds potentially productive, but nobody really offered anything concrete — just a lot of general buzzwords.

That night, we treated ourselves to dinner at a new (to us) restaurant, a cute little place with outdoor tables under big trees adorned with swings, and chickens scurrying around at our feet to wish us a happy new year.

Finally, on Thursday we attended a little ceremony, in which the school signed a partnership agreement with an institution that teaches coding. They wanted us to be there, and as many other bodies as possible, to make more impressive photos. But it was rather interesting, particularly hearing two students (boys about 12 to 13) who spoke excellent English giving slide presentations about coding projects they’d created.

And then, at last, the real (half) vacation began!

4/6-14/2024