Virus on 6Z …
January 27 – May 1, 2020 At the office today we’re silent, wearing masks and staring at computer and phone screens. The news isn’t reassuring – slack screening at the airports – but still only one reported case in Sihanoukville. Just three students have come to the office this afternoon and the building feels empty. We’re subdued, filled with dread. It’s normal for Sreymom and Sovy to wear masks whenever they have a “change of season” cold or want relief from traffic pollution. For me it’s an imposition. I don’t like wearing a mask as it feels like giving in to worry. When I woke up this morning, even though I wasn’t wearing one, I felt the imprint on my face. 6Z is a 70-meter, one-car-width cul-de-sac off Mao Tse Tung Boulevard with side-by-side French colonial villa copies. Since the end of the Vietnamese occupation, the villas have been carved and re-carved into apartments and rented at inflated prices to expat teachers and NGO staff. One of the bottom floors has been converted into a kindergarten, another into a retail space for handcrafted silks, another into an eating area. Each high villa gate, padlocked and topped with razor wire, hides a small yapping dog used to chase feral cats. The old women here are up at 5:30am laughing, exercising with each other, walking and swinging their arms, and before school, kindergarten children kneel at the feet of three chanting monks while their teacher offers bananas. And overhead a mynah squawks from her palm tree. Sreymom went to Aeon Mall Thursday evening and felt afraid – many Chinese, most not wearing masks, and very few Cambodians. Chinese New Year is low key. I wear a mask in all my classes now. Who knows where these kids have been? Where their parents have been? Brothers? Sisters? Thailand? Malaysia? Whose room did they sleep in last night? And I’m in a classroom with them for three to four hours. I know the bad press but … no mask, no deal … it protects me from them and them from me – works both ways. In the early days of the panic, most students wore masks but now it’s six or seven, sometimes fluctuating with news reports. I went to an IELTS workshop
20
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online