Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Hello from the Royal University of Law and Economics!
On Monday afternoon, Stefan and I began teaching our one-week course on International Business Transactions at the Lawyers' Training Center (LTC) located at the Royal University of Law and Economics on busy and chaotic Monivong Boulevard in the centre of Phnom Penh. The LTC is the bar school for recent law graduates. It has only been in existence for a few years and has actually been modeled on the Quebec bar school (except that the Quebec bar school doesn't offer practical courses like International Business Transactions).
The University has approximately 1,000 students. The buildings are built of concrete and have open-air hallways on 4-floors allowing for natural ventilation from the slight breeze. The school "cafeteria" is an open-air area under a tin roof located next to the dusty motorbike parking lot at the rear of the school. There are badminton courts and a bocce ball court for the students to unwind.
The students dress somewhat formally. The males wear long pants and a shirt with a collar - usually in white or blue. The women wear skirts and blouses in similar colours. You also see the occasional monk law student. They wear orange robes and have shaved heads and no shoes. Apparently, becoming a monk is a good way to finance one's law studies. However, to actually become a lawyer, the monks have to leave the monkhood (Apparently, being a monk is somehow incompatible with being a lawyer).
The classroom where we teach measures about 20 feet wide by 40 feet deep and contains 8 rows of wooden benches (like pews) with an aisle up the middle. The walls are made of concrete and painted white. There is a blackboard in the front, but no audio-visual equipment. There are 74 students in our class and it is therefore quite tight for space. The room is supposedly air-conditioned, with 4 ceiling fans, as well. However, the ventilation system is weak and only succeeds in reducing the 40-degree outside temperature to maybe 35 degrees inside the classroom (April is right before the rainy season and is therefore the hottest month of the year). I must lose 5 lbs during every four-hour lecture! It is like teaching in a sauna! Fortunately, we do not have to wear suits and are able to dress in khakis and short sleeve shirts with a collar. Sometimes the electricity goes out and the temperature quickly climbs.
Approximately 40 percent of the students are women. The class ranges in age from 23 to 46 years of age, with most students in their mid-twenties. Their mother tongue is Khmer and they generally seem to speak rudimentary English, but not a sufficiently high level of English to be able to converse on legal topics.
The students are certainly as intelligent as those I have taught at the University of Ottawa and seem very diligent. They defer to authority. For instance, they stand up whenever they wish to address the teacher. However, their cell phones keep going off, which can sometimes get annoying.
The teaching process proceeds slowly, since every sentence or group of sentences that we say to the class must be translated by Phally, our translator. Phally is in his forties and studied law in the 1980's. He is very good at translating.
Khmer seems to be a very verbose language. Even after I say three words, Phally speaks for at least half a minute to translate what I just said.
Phally even manages to translate my humourous comments (or ay least my ATTEMPTS at levity). It is quite strange to make a funny comment and then only hear laughter 45 seconds later. On one occasion, I didn't hear the expected laughter 45 seconds later, so I gave it a second try and explained the joke (I know that, in general, if a joke needs to be explained, it usually isn't funny, but there is, after all, a difference in cultures here!) and to my relief, I heard even more laughter than usual. Perhaps they were laughing with me or perhaps they were laughing at me. I would like to believe that it was the former. However, I will never know!
By the second day, the students answered our questions quite willingly. The process is time-consuming, though, since my question, then their answers and then my reaction all need to be translated. The advantage of this lengthy process is that I get plenty of time to review the next few pages of my notes while Phally rambles on in Khmer.
The students clearly enjoy hearing practical examples. When I explained how lawyers exchange drafts of contracts by e-mail using the redline/strikeout function in Word, they were riveted. Once, I illustrated a practical example by describing the meeting of a lawyer with his client to discuss the preparation of an agreement. For added realism, I decided to begin by mentioning that the hypothetical meeting began with the lawyer offering a cup of coffee to his client. The students seemed fascinated by the idea that we serve drinks to our clients and asked questions on that aspect of my story! Because there are so few lawyers in Cambodia, the law students do not have role models and have never had a summer job in a law firm, as would their North American counterparts.
The cultural references here are also quite different. When I wanted to discuss the relative bargaining power of a major purchaser of goods as compared to a smaller purchaser, I decided to teach them about Walmart, which none of them had ever heard of. I then proceeded to spend 15 minutes teaching them what Walmart is.
The most amazing example of differences in cultural references was when I wanted to explain what a franchise agreement is. Since I could not think of any franchises that I had seen in the streets of Phnom Penh, I decided to use the world's best-known franchise, McDonald's, as my example. When I asked if anyone had heard of McDonald's, absolutely nobody had a clue what I was talking about (I even drew the golden arches on the blackboard and wrote the restaurant chain's name in full). I then spent the next half-hour teaching a room full of young adults in their 20's what McDonald's is! (I also taught them the basics of franchise law at the same time, of course).
So far, we have been very well received, and the experience has been very satisfying for me. It is good to know that I am helping to reinstitute a proper justice system in a country where they killed all the lawyers not long ago.
It seems that Stefan and I have quickly developed a good reputation in the local legal community here. We have been invited to give an abbreviated version of our course at the school for judges on Friday morning. I am certainly looking forward to teaching law to judges!
I will let you know how it goes.
Regards,
--Larry
