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.