“Wow!” the kids exclaim as one more piles onto my couch around a Noah storybook. “One pair of elephants came and then a pair of tigers. Nearly every kind of animal was there—a pair of cows … and there are two boars!”

Another group of kids is busy with blocks on the floor. On the porch, some boys play a board game in a rather vague and chaotic fashion, never having bothered to read the instructions.

I have only one board game, a sack of blocks, and a handful of old magazines, puzzles and picture books in my kid-stuff inventory, but to these kids who have never played with anything they didn’t find in the dirt, my house is like Disneyland. They have gotten a lot better at puzzle making, and their block buildings have improved, too. They make stilted houses, laughing almost to tears when they fall over.

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Little Olavee delights the whole group by selling colored blocks with his own ice cream commercial: “Now available, Phnom Penh Ice Cream. Satisfying and delicious. Flavored coconut, taro, coffee and durian!” How they can laugh!

Listening to the chatter of these young visitors, I am reminded that these children are as bright, sensitive and creative as any in America. They know what they can play with and what isn’t a toy. “Teacher! He is playing with your . . . thing!” On the verge of tears, Olavee tries to drag a bigger boy away from my globe. “Teacher, what is that? How are we supposed to look at it?”

My globe is quite a conversation piece. Even graduates from the local high school aren’t familiar with globes. Once I had to run home and get it to show a grandma who wanted to know where I am from. She kept asking where America was exactly. Was it farther than Phnom Penh? Was it even farther than Thailand? It took me a while to help her understand that America and France are nowhere near each other.

How to explain a globe to kids who have never been more than a day’s trip on a cow cart from their village? “That’s a globe,” I begin. The kids giggle and mimic the word. “It’s . . . a map,” I try again. More giggles, but now they are starting to realize I am not trying to be funny. They have never heard the word map before, either, so I start at the beginning. “All the blue is water. The other colors are land. The land isn’t really colorful like that, but they choose different colors for countries so we can tell countries apart.”

Olavee points at Australia, colored green, and asks if it is water. Green and blue aren’t commonly differentiated here.

“How old are you?” I ask him. He fidgets and glances at his friends. “I don’t know, Teacher. I just know I am big—very big.”

The kids lose interest in the globe and start flipping through colorful kindergarten Bible storybooks. Little mister big boy leans against the arm of my chair and watches me. “Teacher, there is a lot of dirt on your computer screen. Teacher, what would you call a car in French?” He tries to repeat la voiture after me, and hearty laughter erupts from the block builders nearby.

These children live such natural lives. They know all the hills and plains by heart. They know the names and habits of all the animals, birds and insects, and they are very familiar with every type of tree and plant. As they tend their family’s cattle, they sit and make necklaces of red berries and braid bracelets out of grass.

One little girl, Rofeah, often comes carrying a baby sister and holding another by the hand. She has big, brown eyes, round and full like a deer’s, a bright, eager face and a childish smile. She tells me all the news of the village, how So-and-So lost something, and then his mother scolded him, and he got sulky and ran up and slept in the hut on their cassava field, and then his sister saw him and told his uncle, what his uncle said, what someone else said, how they had a quarreled about it and so forth. The details don’t interest me half as much as the charming vivacity of the teller.

It’s good to know I’ll always have friends. I hope I can love them as much as they love me.

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