After more than eight years of studying political science, I thought that at least I would have a clear concept of how a country is created. Hell no!

It was an English lesson exercise I had worked on with my 9^th grade students. The idea was to steer up a discussion, in English, and I thought it would b a good idea to talk about the perfect place to live in. “create your own country” I said, and got the “hrm… ?!?” look I have learned to love. “Yeah – today you can make your perfect world. let’s talk about what sort of country you would like to live in”. to clear some of the confusion we started talking about the basic Wikipedia-style info about the country. They said a country of about 10 million people would suit them just fine. Size? I asked. Well – this got things going. Some of them wanted a country the size of Cambodia, and others – well they went big and had Russian dreams. By a vote, the final agreement landed on the Thai front, thus tripling the size of their current country. For national languages they said they want to keep Khmer, but to add to that English, Chinese and Korean. To my surprise regarding the last language, they explained to me how powerful and important they see Korea in their region. Less surprises, but more laughter, was recorded when I asked about their new national food. Fried fish and chocolate they yelled. It was a good opportunity for us to learn the word “SEPARATLY”.

After clearing out more important matters like national sports (boxing and volleyball), And religion (Buddhism), we go to the good stuff: what sort of government do you want? Well that got an interesting split when all the girls said they wanted a king and a queen, and the boys insisted on a democracy. The conclusion was a democratic Monarchy, and we even went so far as to agree there shall be 15 parties, with elections every five years.

I was again surprised when I asked if they wanted an army in the country, and for the first time we had a unanimous vote: NO. They did, however ask for a police force, and when all options were on the table as to what the force should do, between letting criminals go to killing them, they chose the very traditional court system. A sigh of relief.

Bitter debates were held on the two last questions – the education system, and the citizenship. As for education, the boys all wanted to learn from the age of 6 to 25. “and you?” I said to the girls, as I saw they had a different idea. Till 22 they said. Why? Well, marriage and babies are calling, it seems. The notion of citizenship was even more unclear, but they did an impressive work choosing a “by blood” system to becoming a citizen, and demanding an immigrant will learn the local culture and live in the country for a long time.

The full-week’s session ended with the handing out of passports that I made for them, complete with all the information they have gathered for their new country – named Khemorak Bot, by the way – “the Khmer Sons”. At the end of it all they have a few empty pages, as the next session will be about traveling, and they will be stamped as we cross more mile stones in our way.

See, this is what we do here. We teach English, but we consider it to be only an instrument – to allow the people of this community to dream, to fantasize, to think beyond the confine of the big river. And once shown the way, they jump on so fast…