The Trouble With Monks

The Trouble With Monks

While Makara helps care for the children at the orphanage every day, my primary work is teaching English. I started out teaching the young women at the Sewing Training Center at 6:30 each morning. But I’ve now added private tutoring for Venerable Choern, LHA’s Deputy Director, and Sovatha, LHA’s financial director, every afternoon.

They both speak English with varying degrees of ability. The young women come more recently to English, and some have had no schooling at all. They will return to their villages when their training is over, and some of them believe they will never encounter an English speaker again. They approach our classes with varying levels of interest, but they remain unfailingly gracious, polite and respectful to their teacher.

I am assisting their usual teacher, a young monk named Savoun who allows me to lead the class and translates for me. We are covering words and phrases that pertain to sewing – needle, thread, sleeve, cuff, “Do you have the scissors?” and “Is your sewing machine broken?” We had a moment when I was explaining to him the difference between a zipper and fly, and he pointed out that monks do not use a fly because monks do not wear pants (or drawers for that matter).
Let me now explain the ground rules. Monks are not permitted to touch or be touched by women. No shaking hands, no standing too close in pictures, no sitting in the same part of a car or van with a woman. We aren’t even supposed to hand them anything directly (but they’re not especially strict about that).

Now, when you consider that they are some of the finest looking men around with those shaved heads (Shaving Day comes twice a month), wearing the hottest shades of the color spectrum (rust, marigold, butterscotch –they even have matching umbrellas), in those off-the -shoulder robes against that café au lait skin… and no pants to boot? I mean, is that even fair?!!?!!? O

Lord, I hope I’m not blaspheming.

The monks I’m around the most are in their 20’s-early 30’s. As you can imagine, I’ve caught myself more than once, just in the nick of time, reaching out to touch a monk arm. They are sweet and sincere young men, hardworking, dedicated to helping others and improving themselves, lovely human beings almost impossible to resist.

Almost.