I move carefully down the stairs, trying to put my feet where the metal frame offers the most support under each cracked, tin-covered step. The three classrooms above are empty now. The recess bell has rung, and all the students at the little English school above the church are out in the yard. They watch my descent eagerly. It is my first day teaching.
They form a ring around me, elementary kids of different ages, all dressed in the national school uniform of white shirts and black or blue pants/skirts. Most are openly staring, brown eyes wide, all smiles. Others, mostly the older boys, feign disinterest and start kicking a soccer ball into the Noah’s ark mural on the cement wall–but they don’t wander away.
I sit down, ready.
“’Cher,” a little girl asks immediately, with great politeness, “how did you get your skin so white?”
An intent silence.
I grin. “I was born that way. People in other countries are born with different colors of skin, hair, and eyes—”
Gasps and murmurs.
“Eyes!” Another girl stares into mine. “What color are they?”
“Yellow!” shouts one.
“No, amber!”
“Green,” I say. It’s the closest thing to my hazel.
“What? Green?” This is incredible.
“What color are your father’s eyes?”
“The same as hers, silly,” answers another student, wise in the way of genetics.
Unfortunately, he is wrong.
“No, blue.”
“Then what color are your mother’s eyes?” a boy asks in amazement.
“Brown, like yours.”
“Oh,” a girl nods, understanding dawning, “her mother is Khmer.”
“No,” I say, unable to keep from laughing. “She is American.”
This is too deep to understand. The subject must be dropped for now.
“Where do you live?”
“Where are you from?”
“What do they speak in America?”
“Say something in American!”
“What-is-your-name-my-name-is?”
“Oh, you are asking too many questions!” says one girl with braids, pulling at her friends. “Come away, leave ’Cher alone.”
The kids move a few steps away, then come surging back as none other than the girl in braids puts forth a new question.
“What number are you among your brothers and sisters?”
“The oldest,” I answer.
“The oldest,” she repeats, and then looks around. “Oh, come away! ’Cher will get tired.”
“’Cher, why do you keep drinking water?” asks one, as I take a sip from my water bottle.
“Because it’s hot!” I reply.
I overhear the boys kicking the soccer ball.
“Je-sus, Je-sus.”
They know they are being rude, mocking a god that way, and they are doing it to see what I might do.
“Where is Jesus from?” one asks the other.
“Jesus is American.”
Laughter.
“No,” I say, turning my head. It’s hard to know exactly how to correct that. “Jesus is from Israel.”
“Israel?” The boys laugh some more and keep kicking their soccer ball.
There is so much else to say, but it is not the time to say it.
Another boy, inspired by the mural on the wall, is enthusiastically retelling the story of Noah and the Flood to his classmate. He might have said that the animals helped Noah build the ark.
“…and the animals, all the kinds, tigers, elephants, cows, lions, all of them! They all went in the boat too, a pair and a pair.”
“Why did they go in the boat?” The boy swings his legs, kicking up dust. Tied around his brown wrist, like so many of the other kids, is a red string, to keep evil spirits away.
“Animals are afraid of water, too! If they get in the flood, they’d die, just like people.”
“Oh-h.”
When recess is nearly over, I go carefully up the stairs to review the lesson. One of the talkative girls sticks her head in the door. The important question is still bothering her.
“’Cher, how did you get those color eyes?”
“I was born that way!” I stop, thinking of a better answer. “When God made me, he made me that way. How did you get those color eyes?”
She beams. “I was born that way!” She darts out again.
Another face. “’Cher, are we annoying? Do we make you tired?”
“No, no,” I say.
I want to fling aside these English books and open up the Bible with these darling children. But today we are learning the words, “library” and “airport,” and how to sound out words beginning with “S-N” and “S-K”. It’s frustrating. Yet, I remind myself, there are so many small opportunities, even as an English teacher. But I am only one me.
It’s a tiny English school, set up in the back of a small little church building, in a small village of a small district. The district is in a province that some Cambodians don’t even know exists, and the province is in a country a lot of people in America couldn’t find on a map.
But every child in that little school yard has a precious, precious soul behind their shining brown eyes.
How can I look away?