We had our first day of teaching English at elementary
schools in the area. A girl named Taylor and I will be team teaching the 4th,
5th and 6th graders. At least that is kind of what it is
like… The ages kind of very for each class we teach and we’re not exactly sure
how the grade levels work here, but we teach kids about 8 to 12 years old.
Today was interesting because we didn’t really know what we were doing. There
were a few teachers that kind of speak English and were helping to show us
where we needed to go and what topic to teach on. We were kind of supposed to
just figure it out as we went, but I think we did a good job. I was interesting
to teach English when we didn’t know anyway Thai, but it was kind of fun to get
creative and I think we were able to teach everything we needed to.
Tuesday
There is a woman in a village whose house burnt down, so we
went to help with rebuilding it. I think her husband passed away, so we worked
with her song and prepared for the project. We basically just moved supplies
and knocked down the walls still standing. It was cool though, because our
group got a system down for moving some really heavy materials up the hill to
the spot of land where she lived. 
Wednesday
Wednesday
We have networked with a group called World Vision. A small group of us worked with a few of their volunteers and some women in a village today. They promote ideas and projects that teach self-sufficiency. Today we made hats out of card board boxes. They teach this so that people can save their milk cartons and boxes for food and use them to make sunhats. It was pretty clever.
Thursday
We visited the nearby school districts and worked out with
them that we will teach English to their teachers. There are so many people and
groups who want our help with teaching English. These districts wanted us to
teach their students as well, but one of our group members threw out the idea
that we should teach teachers. Our group needs to be helpful in ways that are
sustainable and helping the teachers who will continue to be there will be much
more useful than teaching kids for a few weeks in the summer before our group
members start leaving.
Friday
A few of us coordinated our own smaller projects and
finished them up. I worked with the school that I teach at and decided that I
wanted to decorate the windows of the first graders’ classrooms with pictures
and English words. Their windows had this kind of stuff on them, but they were
faded and needed to be replaced. I had thought it would be cool to teach the
first graders and incorporate the window project into a lesson with them. However,
the school ended up having us teach older kids. So We’re just going to make the
room cute and put up the words that the teachers will teach them throughout the
year.
Saturday
Most of the group spent the weekend in Chiang Mai, but a few
of us stayed in town. We went to visit an orphanage on Saturday morning which
was a really good experience. The place is actually run by a church and they
take in kids dealing with various circumstances. Some are orphans, some have been
in bad situations with their parents or only have a single parent that can’t
take care of them and some of the children are victims of trafficking. The
campus takes in children from all over Thailand and many people want to use
their services every year, but they can only accommodate 100 kids. We were
really impressed by how things are run there. Everyone contributes to the work
that needs to be done and they are like a big family.
It’s also neat because the church does not do any kind of
fundraising or advertising, but they pray and are somehow able to have the
means for growing the campus. When we asked about how we could help them, we
talked about some simple programs to do with the kids, but they also said that
they have a problem with clean water and electricity. They are in the middle of
nowhere, so it’s really expensive to bring electricity to them and they have
hoped to get a well because their water gets too dirty to drink during parts of
the year. We are looking into options for a water filter and that may be
something that we can help them with. It’s neat because Mom just told me about
a guy that does water filtering projects and I’m really interested in
researching his work more.
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