School.

This is different from college. My last term at Union i had class two days a week, and it never started before.... i dont even remember. Maybe nine o'clock, which i believe students at Union find a struggle to get to. I now have it 6 days a week, and have to be there at 7:30. So i try and get up at about 6:00, which i haven't done since i worked construction. It takes some getting used to. I'm afraid I've missed some morning sessions.

Let me tell you about my school. I wish that sentence could be supplemented by a terrific visual cutaway of my school and the activities taking place within it, a la The Life Aquatic. Unfortunately i only have 4 pictures to try and explain this place, although i may add some more as things move along. It's weird to take pictures of my school though, as no one understands why i am doing it.

Here is a blurry picture of my classroom, with my teacher sitting on a bench in the back right of the room, and some of my classmates sitting and standing on the left. This room is on the fourth floor of the building, and behind the point i am taking this picture from is a balcony with a pretty nice view. Across a few streets, you can see a building in the middle of construction, with a massive sign roped to it that says "Coming Soon! Rooms for Rend!" I find it hilarious, and enjoy looking at it every bleary-eyed morning.



The school was founded in 1978 according to one of the students who speaks some English, and I am probably the only barang (foreigner) to ever go here. I get a lot of incredulous looks from people in other departments of the school. They teach several levels of automobile repair in addition to moto-repair.

I did succeed in explaining to one kid that I attend the school so I can later teach people how to fix bikes who otherwise could not afford it. Interestingly, people from many different provinces of Cambodia go to my school, some of whom live in a room next to the classroom. This is good, because if I decide it would be good to send some students from T.C. here, they would have a place to stay and integrating with everyone probably wouldn't be that bad, as people are from everywhere, reducing the likelihood of intensely clique-ish social interaction.

There are 3 parts to the moto-repair course. I am in the first, which is where you take apart beat up old engines and learn the names of all the parts in Khmer, with a significant dose of French. For example, the clutch pressure plate is knows as the ‘Plateau de pression.’ Or at least that is how I phonetically wrote the pronunciation. Brief interlude about french - I went running at the olympic stadium tonight, and while resting at the top of the stairs (I'll take some pictures, it's pretty cool) an old man came up to me and asked where i was from. I said the US, and he said "ah, parlez vous francais?" I missed the connection, but said "oui, J'ai etudie en ecole, mais je" and made a motion of things coming out of my head, because i can't remember how to say forgot everything. He laughed and said "oui, J'etudie en ecole quand je tres juen". I think. Basically, he said yeah, i studied it when i was very young. It was so random, but really cool. People are super curious and nice here, which is very refreshing.

Once more aside about running. While i was running, i heard someone following me in flip-flops. I started speeding up and running about as fast as i was comfortable with on the sketchy concrete, and the person kept-up! as i turned around to start walking and cool down, i saw a pretty tired looking kid, who gave me a high five and said something like "i win you". I think he meant he beat me, because i stopped before he did. I laughed and started wandering around the stadium, which is when i encountered the old man who spoke french. Later i went back down the stairs and ran into the kid. We had a hilarious conversation involving questions like "why you run so fast?" and "is my pronunciation good?" (it was very good) He was learning english at "jesus christ", also known as church, because it was free, or at least cheap.

Sorry for that random set of stories, getting back to the school. We draw all the parts in a notebook, and it is broken up into sections of the engine. So the first is the cylinder head and cylinder, the second is the clutch (there are actually two, a normal one and a centrifugal one, which is cool and a clever way to make the clutching automatic whilst having different gears) etc. We take the engines out of a cabinet full of them, seen below, and then take them fully apart, as seen below that.






So we learn the part names, which for two of the engines are written on boards like the one in the picture below, and do it for several different engines.
The first is a Honda cub engine. They are tremendously prolific and have been produced in subtly different forms for decades. The next one i learned about was a Honda Chaly engine, which is like the cub engine but is kick start only, and is fully automatic, only having a centrifugal clutch. I've more recently been working on Suzuki engines, one of which is from Japan and one of which is from Korea. I believe the final step in this process is learning how to work on two stroke engines.



Once you have everything memorized, you move to the next section, which is in a different room. I think once I get to this stage I will need a translator, because this is the part where you learn how things actually work. In the first part, they don’t explain how the clutch works, or the generator makes electricity and translates that into a spark. I know how the former works and mostly know how the latter works, but learning more complex ideas like that in Khmer would be a distinct
challenge. I'm not sure people will be excited about a translator telling me everything the teacher says in English, but i'll cross that bridge when i get to it.

After you get through the second stage you arrive at the final one, which is where you work on bikes that are whole, and actually work. I occasionally hear them start up in the next room. That part i will almost certainly need a translator for, although I have a feeling there is less teaching going on here, and more like testing. I would guess the teachers set up a machine with a problem, i.e. a carb setting purposefully off or a manufactured short in the wiring, and then give people a chance to try and fix it.

This would be a reasonably good way to try and teach the least tangible yet most important aspect of being a mechanic, which is the ability to diagnose what’s wrong
with the machine. I'm not sure how well this can be taught though, even with manufactured problems in a machine. I think it just takes experience earned from time spent working on broken things.

I have a teeny-tiny bit of this, but it's like being in first grade and you become a mechanic when you get your PhD. For example, when we were working on my dirt bike (pictures of which i will try and get up soon), the carburetor settings were messed up and it took several days to figure out exactly what was wrong. Several of the jets had been drilled, and tuning a not-stock carb is next to impossible, because everything affects everything else.

The engine would run well at idle and then struggle as revs raised. I had experienced this problem with my motorcycle in the US right after I bought it, and while riding mine around realized it wasn’t getting enough fuel because the airbox was off, increasing the amount of air going through the carbs. So I would close the choke partially to richen the fuel/air ratio while riding. I tried this on the dirt bike, and it worked.

Most of that carb was eventually tossed anyway, and a new one was built out of several other ones. So my realization didn’t really have that big of an impact of the end result, but it was something that I only knew about because I had previously experienced it, which is basically the rule of repairing machines.

So I don’t know if that kind of thing is taught, and how I would be able to pass it on to my students. Being a good mechanic is almost entirely about having the right mind set. You need to be objective, inquisitive, analytical, and patient. I’m sure you can teach that, but through a significant language and culture barrier it is a serious challenge.

As things develop with the school i will try and keep everyone updated. It's an interesting place, and i feel lucky to be going there. If people have questions about it that will better illuminate what it's like, please ask them in the comments section.

Thanks for reading/commenting!

Ned.