I have been incredibly lax in updating my blog recently. I do apologize and I would never want to keep my public waiting (Are all bloggers this narcissistic?), but the past week has been a complete whirlwind.
So remember how I said that we don't really teach because there are always random holidays and random activities that take precedence over education (scout day-super important. must dress up in girl scout and boy scout uniforms once a week and parade around for an hour or all will be lost)? Well, our school is all of a sudden closed this week for the flu pandemic that has been going around Thailand. Horray for the Swine flu! We had no classes last week for "mid term exams", we had a 3 day holiday the first week we started teaching, and now this. So our school will reopen on August 3 and English Camp has been moved to that week, August 4 and 5th (god knows we wouldn't want to cancel English camp). So now, I won't even see some of my classes again. Obviously the flu is a random inconvenience that couldn't be avoided, but I am really disappointed. All in all, of the 7 weeks I will have spent here, only 3 will be spent teaching at my original school. Que sera sera I suppose...
Well I drove myself crazy with boredom sitting around last week. I was so bored that I agreed to go to Pichit-desperate times resulted in some very desperate measures, as witnessed by my adventure to Pichit. Pichit is a larger city about 30 km away from Taphanhin, and is the capital of the Pichit province (imagine that). From our first week here, the dreaded teacher Tessani (from English Camp) offered (threatened?) to take us to Pichit to see the "crocodiles!". Apparently, and as we found out that morning, Pichit's mascot is an enormous fake crocodile named "Chalawan". This is for some reason a huge tourist attraction. Last Tuesday night, after a day of mumbling around Taphanhin, when my host mother offered to have us go to Pichit with her for work, I jumped at the chance ( I think I was delusional from the heat). Why wouldn't I want to see a large crocodile statue named Chalawan? Done and done. So last Wednesday morning, we jumped in the van, dropped my host mom off at her meeting in Pichit and Crystal, the driver and I picked up a woman named "Mon", who was a friend of my host mom and our host for the morning. We first stopped off at the local temple, of course, to pray to Buddha and all that good stuff. Then-Chalawan! I have to admit, it was pretty interesting. Chalawan sits on the edge of a large pond in Pichit that was quite pretty, and there was even an "aquarium" (I use quotations b/c there were about 20 fish) where we saw some fish, and got to feed popcorn to the vultures of carp-looking fish in the pond. Hey-it beats sitting around the pharmacy. I got some great Asian tourist pictures complete with peace signs-not a total loss. We got to go to lunch and eat super spicy and delicious papaya salad and make awkward conversation with our random tour guides for the day, always a good time.
Back in Taphanhin, we headed to school to help record sound bites for the English-computer game the teachers use. The two English teachers who asked us to help are these two adorable little old ladies that cannot for the life of them operate the recording equipment and giggle incessantly. Everything takes twice as long as it should, but they bring us yummy snacks and drinks, so I let it slide. We are doing the sound for all of the software, so it is very, very tedious-reading out sentences and vocab lists. This was our third, two hour session of reading "Vocabulary. 1. orange", over and over again. This is when we found out that school was canceled. No one contacted us or our host parents. No one contacted our director. These two little old ladies just casually mentioned that school would be canceled...so once we went home and told our host parents, they naturally jumped into hyper-planning mode action. They decided that we would go to Bangkok for the weekend, and then Llong Mink (Uncle Mink-Crystal's host father) almost died of happiness when he heard that we might be able to go to "Tilasu", which is a city wayyy in the North of Thailand. He has been talking about taking us there since we arrived, and despite our protests that we cannot just leave school and run off to Tilasu (we are technically supposed to be here to teach), he keeps insisting that it is totally fine and that we can just be "absent" because we absolutely must go here. Tilasu is apparently where the women put the gold rings around their necks...and I've only seen pictures in the stereotypical National Geographic article on "exotic" cultures...so I was really excited. I am also kind of warming up to car trips in the family van with our family. We get to watch English movies and they stuff us with yummy snacks, which of course I love.
Dum dum dum....once we told Daniel, our program "director", he nipped our whole adventure in the bud. After some "interesting" emails and phone calls back and forth, it was decided that we could not violate the "laws" ( I personally think that calling the loosely applied rules of a completely disorganized and poorly run volunteer organization laws is a bit of a stretch...) of Learning Enterprises and not teach for a week. So it was A-ok for us to sit around while the students had mid terms (which should have been found out beforehand in my humble opinion) and do nothing, but because of the flu, our mini-adventure planned by our gracious and adorable host families would violate some innate "law" of LE. Umm yea about that. Next time I sign up to go on a trip organized by a random non-profit run by college students, just shoot me. Whatever. Not a battle worth fighting at this point-
So the bright side of all of this is that we were lucky to be invited to another school in the area as guest teachers for the week. This school is where we should have been all along! It is a small, government school that takes students who cannot pass the entrance exam to get into our other school (I didn't even know there was an entrance exam!) and so it attracts the poorer students who have less opportunities. After long conversations with the head of the English Department there, I am so grateful to be teaching there and totally inspired for what feels like the first time this entire trip. The students in Taphanhin whose parents are wealthy have tutors and extra help and classes that enable them to be able to pass the entrance exams and go to the "best" school in the area. The students whose parents collect plastic bottles for a living, or who dump them with their grandparents and go off to Bangkok are the students at this school-out of 28 students who made it to 12th grade last year at this school (most of the students drop out early-the girls around 13 to get married...the boys to work), only 5 went on to university! So Crystal and I are guest teaching English there this week and absolutely loving it. First of all, nobody has treated us like a circus animal yet. Can you believe it? There was no song and dance, but the teachers and director of the school have been down to earth, sweet and so welcoming. We are teaching all different ages, and the students are definitely a little bit behind compared to Taphanhin school, but they are so eager to learn and adorable. I'm absolutely loving it! It's too bad that I only have one week with them, but for next year we are insisting that they send volunteers here.
More updates to come on my weekend in Bangkok which did happen and was amazing and totally ridiculous.
I miss everyone, only 12 more days until I get back to the land of cheeseburgers, beer and cereal. I would give a kidney for some Heart to Heart right now...soon enough!
xoxo
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