Placement no.3: Teaching

My sister, Nikita, after viewing all the fun posts I blog about weekends and evenings here with other volunteers asked me "Do you ever work Georgia?".
Yes. Yes I do!

Yesterday's timetable went something like this-

10-11 Grade 1 Questions   Joy  Gabby  Axel
10-11 Grade 4 Questions  Georgia  Jane  Aisling
11-12 Grade 2 Questions   Jane  Georgia  Gabby
11-12 Grade 5 Questions   Aisling  Axel  Joy

LUNCH

1-2 Grade 3 Question  Gabby Aisling Joy
1-2 Georgia Axel Jane Free
2-3 Grade 6 Question   Jane  Aisling
2-3 Grade 1-3 Song and Game  Gabby Joy
2-3 Grade 4-6 Song and Game  Axel Georgia

5-6 Karen Hilltribe Class  Georgia Jane

I love so much that 'Song and Game' makes up part of the curriculum. As well as meditation and exercise. It's makes for more well rounded students :) This means all the those I learnt in girl guide campfires became vital knowledge. A musical theatre variation of 'When the saints go marching in' became a favourite of the hilltribe girls last night and Aisling and I just taught 'Ollie Ollie Ollie/Oi Oi Oi' to Kindergarten class. Considering the entire chant consists of only two words this was surprisingly difficult. But they loved it :D

I'm trying to work out how to put this photo into better resolution, it's Aisling and I with this morning's kindergarten class :)      (I'm in yellow)

 

Another highlight of this placement has to be playing football with the children. The heat can be intense and yesterday the field was swarming with dragonflies- it was like a horror movie- the field was thick with dragonflies. It was my team vs Axel's team. We're not sure which team won, given the fact we don't know which child was one which team and because there were too many dragonflies to see what was going on. Fun though. Because even in Thai humid heat wearing flip flop I'm good at football. If only because I have a 3ft advantage over my 8 year old teammates...

PS: I may update this post over the weekend with more photos ect. but I want to publish it while we have internet connection (it comes and goes very quickly)

Placement no.3

Above photo: Taken from the hammock. Not the best quality as I forgot my camera so had to use my laptop camera. Hopefully you can make it rice paddies with a mountain backdrop.

 

I'm staying at the Tom  Karen centre- a functioning building with electricity and mosquito-proof windows. We are spoiled (this isn't sarcasm. The place is lovely). The bathroom has a light, an flushing toilet, dry floor and TOILET ROLL. All of this made for a lot of gasping from us volunteers.

 

We teach at a hilltribe school from 9-3 and for an hour after school at the centre.

 

Mod, our host Mum is wonderful. Last night Aisling told her she'd never seen a firefly, Mod ran to get a bamboo mat for us all to sit on and turned off all the lights Ash and I insisted everyone turn off their phones so we sat in complete darkness (it's not like there's any street lighting here..).
Soon fireflies came some only a metre away from us. It's like zooming fairy lights in the sky.

 

Mod also came to our school during lunch hour today and explained she had cooked tofu sweet and sour for Axel and I as the school was making pork curry and she knew Axel was Jewish and I vegetarian. She made food and bought it in for us. I love Mod!
(She also said she would teach us all how to cook Thai food tonight :D )

 

This is Axel, by the way. He's French and when he says 'Hokey Pokey' it sounds like 'Le Honky Pokeny'. I laugh about this approximately ten times a day.

 

 

The 48 hour day, Villages and Campfire-ing

 

I planned to write about the journey here (I arrived in London at 9.30am and landed in Chiang Rai at 9.35am (Thai time). Which was confusing. Basically I spent 24 hours travelling across a time zone and arrived 5 minutes later, the next day. I didn’t sleep for 48 hours, I had breakfast-lunch-dinner-breakfast-lunch-dinner and then slept (for 6 hours). And then this morning I woke up (voluntarily) at 6am for a shower. A cold water shower. Hot water doesn't exist here.

Anyway, instead of writing about the foundation or things that happened over the 48 hours I wanted to write about this evening. There’s around 60 volunteers right now from all over the world: Ireland, India, America, Canada, France…and we’re all aged between 18-27 so it’s like being at a summer camp. Constant craziness and banter. It’s also hilarious the language differences between US/UK/Australian/Canadian English. We all keep laughing at each other and having to explain what was funny. Example-

Emily: I’m just going to nip to the toilet
Steph: You’re going to  do what to the toilet?

Steph: We just had our national celebrations
Emily: Independence day?
Steph:*laughs* No, it’s like Canada’s birthday?
Me: (deapan) What do you do, bake a cake?

Then we walked into the local village. The village shop is basically a load of products at the front of this womans house. Her cats and kids run around the ‘store’ (her house) this never fails to amuse me. It’s so far from CMK: the huge air conditioned shopping complex. She then told us if we turned right we could visit her hilltribe village, and that seemed to nice and offer to pass up. So four of us went.

We also befriended the cutest hilltribe kids who we played with for a while.

 

Tonight we decided to make a fire.
I love campfires. Campfires camping, campfires at parties. So when an older volunteer mentioned we could make campfires whenever we wanted I was literally like-

 

 

The foundation is located between all these hills covered in lush green jungle so it’s the most beautiful place to be. It’s superhumanly beautiful: lightning on the hillside, dragonflies and twenty teens and twenty-something's sitting on logs under the stars. We could literally be the advert for a travel brochure. Then MoMo got out her Ukulele so we all sang (cumbaya style) 'I'm Yours' and 'The A Team' and roasted bananas (you don’t get marshmallows here. You can't get anything sugary in Thailand it seems, but that’s a whole other blog!).