06/04/12 – 06/09/12

Monday

It was Buddha Day!! Yes, there is a day to celebrate Buddha’s birthday… Or something like that. So, we actually had the day off from teaching because schools were closed. We were able to have a neat cultural experience that night though. For Buddha Day, there was (of course) music playing from the temple at the top of the nearby hill for the whole town to hear all day. Then at night, our team went to the temple at the top of the hill for a celebration which was being held.

The tradition of the night was to go to the temple and kind of pay respect to the Buddhas inside and then outside, everyone holds a branch of flowers, a few sticks of incense and a usually a lit candle. Then you walk around the temple three times and plant your flowers, incense and candle in these flower bed things that were all around the temple. It was interesting to see monks and different people pay respect to Buddha. One of the girls in our group is from Korea and her mom asked her to come do it, so that was cool. Also, our land lady’s nieces took us through the whole ritual and our country directors translated things for us that we didn’t understand. It was nice to know how everything worked and to be a part of the celebration. Another fun moment of the night was that there were two little girls from one of Taylor and my classes at the celebration. We got some pictures with her and then walked around the temple with them.

Side note: I went with Andrea and Justin from home to the temple originally. Just with walking about 100 yards up the hill, we were already kind of tired and we couldn’t remember how long it took to walk up to the temple. I thought how awesome it would be if someone with a pickup truck could give us a ride, so I put out my thumb to attempt hitchhiking for the first time in my life and it worked! There was a cute little family in the back of the truck, so we hopped in and joined them. We also tried to exchange introductions in Thai. They were really sweet. We were glad we got we got a ride too, because the trip to the temple was a lot more rigorous than we’d remembered.

Tuesday

Taylor and I taught English to teachers today. It was at a different school than the one that we usually teach at on Mondays. It was a lot of fun. We taught about 12 ladies that all teach at this school and we loved them. We both said how we kind of felt like we were at a nice church meeting or something. It was also nice because they knew a little bit of English and there was one woman there who is an English teacher and we could communicate pretty well with her. We kind of just taught about basic grammar though and about typical conversational questions and answers. I’ve actually realized over recent years that I really enjoy English grammar, so it was kind of fun to teach it.

Tonight, was also Taylors last night in Thailand, so we lit floating lanterns by the river after dinner. We were all really excited about doing that. It was so pretty to watch!

I’m so sad that Taylor is leaving though! She’s the best and I loved teaching with her!

I also got to skype my family tonight!! I’m so glad I got to see them for a little bit. Miss you guys so much!

Wednesday

Went to a meeting with Chelsea. We will be teaching at an English camp in Chiang Mai in about two weeks. The meeting today was for us to organize the schedule for the camp. We met with a woman named Lovely. She is one of the main people in charge of a group called World Vision and is the main person organizing the English camp and she will be teaching at it along with us. Chelsea and I weren’t necessarily excited about the idea of teaching English right when the opportunity was presented to us, but I think we’ve become more excited about it because of working with her. 

There is a lot of organization with what we will be doing and I think that helps. It will be a two and a half day teaching camp, so we expect that we’ll be exhausted when it’s over. We’ve talked about maybe doing a few fun things in Chiang Rai though, if there is extra time in the day after teaching.

So side notes on today. Chelsea and were successful at traveling to Fang by ourselves for the first time. Fang is the city that World Vision is in and it’s a city we go to very frequently. The trip was actually very easy, but we were still proud of ourselves. We took a Song Tow which picked us up on the side of the road right by our house. There’s basically one main road that goes straight from our town to Fang and the route for the Song Tow ends at a bus stop in the city. We got out there and someone from World Vision picked us up at the bus stop. So ya, super simple, but fun.

After the meeting, World Vision took us out to lunch. It was so nice of them to do, but it ended up being an interesting meal. Sometimes I have a difficult time with eating certain, but poor Chelsea has it much tougher than I do and she’s been struggling with Thai food lately. So anyway, we were treated to a Thai meal and Chelsea and I excused ourselves from the table once so we could trade some of our food… It sounds so silly, but we pulled it off and we were able to still be polite and finish most of the meal. Then Lovely wanted to treat us to a Thai dessert and the three of us ended up splitting something. It was kind of a crunchy jello type dish and I wasn’t a huge fan of the flavor, but the three of us finished it and it was very nice for Lovely to get all of this food for us. We were very grateful.

There wasn’t anything else that Chelsea and I needed to get back to, so we explored around Fang and then caught a Song Tow and I worked on other projects the rest of the day.

Thursday

Went to visit the health clinic today. When we went before (about a week ago), we got to see an evaluation which was done for the clinic. It showed really low numbers for how well they were doing on their medical record keeping and even with the original physical exams which were given to patients. So my thoughts started spinning about how if I could get to know their office a little better, I may be able to help or give suggestions about record keeping. So we went to the clinic today and I had asked to see the report again. I got to really look through the statistics of how accurate their work was and what criteria they were using to evaluate the facility.  I realized however, that the evaluation was actually from 2009 and when I looked through some of their files and patient charts, they had already improved a lot of organization. I also got to ask a ton of questions to the person who gives physical examinations in the clinic. He didn’t know a lot of English, but he pretty much answered all my questions still.

It is interesting to see the difference between healthcare in the United States and in clinics like this one that we visited. I knew going in that, it would be a lot different, but it is still interesting. The man who does the physical examinations didn’t have a much background or training with medicine or medical school. He went to school for 6 months and then had on the job training at the clinic. He has been the examiner since then; for the past 14 years. It was also slightly strange for me to be able to see so much information about the clinic’s patients. It was fine for us to sit in on a meeting that the examiner had with a patient who came in and it was fine for me to look at medical records of many of the patients. Although they usually keep HIV test records pretty confidential.

So, I ended up not starting any medical record keeping projects, because they are doing a good job with their organization. However, I may work with their NGO about getting another thorough evaluation done for the facility. Also, Stephen ended up having a few great ideas for helping the work done with HIV education. The man who works at the clinic, giving information to people about HIV and AIDS and giving tests for the disease was really soft spoken, but seemed to really want to improve the work that he did. So he was full of ideas for improvement, which was really helpful.

After meeting with the clinic, we actually walked out to the main road and hitchhiked to Fang and then took a song tow back home (I promise we were safe). Then we continued doing some research at home for the clinic projects.

Weekend!

We went to the Good News church. They are the ones that run an orphanage. I wrote about it a few weeks back. I think they are so great!

Saturday morning, we helped the kids with chores. One big thing that we were doing was basically pruning their linchee trees. One of the kids would climb up to the top of the tree and start hacking at the big branches with a machete. Then then a group of us would clear off and collect branches and bag up the leaves. I mainly worked with a little girl named Moo-Ka (you kind of pronounce the “moo” like you have a cold). She was so much fun and so smart. We taught each other words and phrases in Thai and English. These kids were so hard working too. It took us several hours to clean up those trees and they seemed to just have the best attitudes the whole time. They really understand how to work together and the whole facility understands how to be self-reliant.

One of the other chores of the day was slaughtering a pig… I may have written about it on another day, but the church raises their own chickens and pigs and they kill and handle the meat of a pig every two weeks. The pigs are HUGE too. They’re at least the size of two of me. It’s really cool that they handle I’m okay that I didn’t help with that project today.

(I’LL WRITE MORE ABOUT THE WEEKEND SOON!)