The only thing I am not a fan of are the mysterious bug bites I now have from yesterday! Thank goodness I have all my shots! :)
Every Thursday part of our team goes and works on some other projects while other people go to schools and teach English again. Every Monday we are going to be teaching English as well! I had the opportunity to go to a school today that was quite different from any school I have ever been. We drove our trusty stead as a team to a certain place today and then were picked up by a teacher from one of the schools who really likes to drive fast :) Gratefully we made it safely to our final destination!
One thing that I noticed that is different in Thailand are the schools and the school systems. Some schools here are given money from the government, and others are not. The school that I will be teaching at every Monday is funded by the government, so it is a nicer school for this area. You could tell that there was order to the school and the way that things were run. Today the school that we went to was a different story. Right from when we walked on to the school ground you could see that things were different. There just didn't seem to be much order to what was going on and what the students were doing. The school grounds themselves were not the cleanest thing I have ever seen, as well as the classrooms. It made me so grateful for the schools that I was able to go to while I was growing up and where I have been able to teach for the last two years. I am grateful for the clean environment that we keep in our schools in America.
We were able to teach in a few different classrooms while we were there. I was with two other volunteers that I am here with and so we team taught. The school that we were at today really doesn't know any English, but one of the volunteers that I was with speaks Thai because he served his mission here! So that was helpful! It is cute here, whenever we come into a classroom to start teaching the students always stand up and say "Good Morning Teacher". For some kids this is the only English that they know, but they most likely don't know what it means :) It is so cute! I can hear it in my mind right now!
So we were greeted this way this morning in all of your classes and had an interesting time trying to help them learn a little English! It is also so interesting that in Thailand education is not really that important, at least in the area that we are at right now. We were teaching in 1st grade and there was a kid who was probably a 14 year old in the classroom. You will notice as you move up in the classrooms that the classes start to get smaller and smaller. By the 6th grade the classes are pretty small. It is really unlikely to meet someone who has an education above the 6th grade. I hear that it is this way because most kids in this area just go and work in the fields when they grow up so there isn't a drive to go on any farther, because higher education isn't used in this area.
We had just been starting our third class for the day when all of the sudden we hear a guy in the ally way outside of the window that we were in spray something, which turned out to be bug spray. We didn't think much of it because we were inside. But a few minutes later a women came to our door and told us that we needed to get out because the bug guy was coming into the school and was going to spray now! So we all rushed out the room and into the play ground area where the rest of the school was going to be for the next 2 hours. I couldn't believe it! During a school day!? When the kids were there!? Couldn't they do it when we were all gone!? One of the school officials that took us to another school to meet up with some other volunteers at another school told us that they had no idea that the guy was coming. The people who spray bugs are just on their own schedule and come when they want. I just think that is crazy!! They closed the windows and doors for an hour so they could really kill all the bugs in there, and then after that they were going to wait another hour to get the rooms aired out before the kids could go back into the rooms. So that cut our teaching short for the day!
We didn't stay around for too long sine there wasn't really anything else for us to do. The Principal took us to meet up with some other volunteers at another school close by that was way nice! This school is government funded so you could tell that they had some nicer things to it. They fed us lunch, which we were so grateful for! At the other school they were going to feed us some chicken parts that seemed very questionable! So we sat with the other volunteers that we were with and had a nice little lunch whole the Thai kids surrounded us! They LOVE Americans! At first a few little kids came up to us and wanted our autograph. After it caught on what we were doing we got a whole swarm of kids! It was so cute! We were famous to them!
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