Thailand 2013!: This past week in recap!

We got back to our little village on Tuesday morning from our weekend getaway from Bangkok! I have to admit that I was having Bangkok withdrawals when I left. I really do love that city!

We got right to work that afternoon that we got back. I have been working with a few other girls on an English Curriculum Booklet for the past few weeks! We are going to leave it with all the schools that we teach English at. It is a resource with TONS of different activities to help the teachers once we are gone to help their students with their English. We have 15 topics with review activities to help them! The topics include food and drink, local animals, family, basic introductions, numbers, shapes, etc.. We had so much fun making it! We also created a little cd with us pronouncing different English words and singing different English songs! That was a blast to make! It was QUITE the project! It turned out to be about 60 pages long! We also have 4 Thai speakers here with us so we are having them translate the whole booklet into Thai so if they have trouble understanding what we wrote they will be able to refer to that! We are so happy with how it turned out! We are so excited to send it to all the teachers once the final copy is perfect! So far it has been one of my favorite projects I have worked on! We spent two whole days here at our house working on it while the rest of the team worked on an obstacle course we are building for a local village!

One afternoon I was able to go to an little Sports Day activity with two other guys that teach or have taught at one of the schools that I teach English at. We were all looking forward to it for a long time and it sadly didn't turn out quite like we expected. We were told that we would be able to coach some sports and play lots of sports with the kids. It turned out to be a little different. :)

Our afternoon started with us at a meeting with all the teachers in the area. It was quite an honor to be there I found out it was just hard not speaking the language to know what they were talking about. It was two hours of trainings for the teachers, so two hours of not really knowing what was going on :) One guy talked for almost an hour! Me and the two guys we were with looked back at the teachers and you could tell that they weren't loving their lives either at that point :)

Promptly after the meeting ended the crowd rushed out to the field for Sports Day! It was all the teachers against each other in the most random games ever! It was random but so fun too! They are really creative here in their activities! It was kind of funny, they kept inviting us to play in different sports with them, then once they realized I wasn't the best at some of the sports I would be replaced with another teacher that was super intense! So I did a lot of sitting and playing with some of the cutest kids ever! Here are some pictures of our afternoon there!

This little guy melted my heart! He didn't have any front teeth, so when he smiled it was so cute!!

This is one of the creative/awkward games that they played. The guy in the front is another volunteer I am here with! He was a good sport in jumping in and getting involved!

The guy on the end is also another volunteer here in Thailand with us. He was also a good sport to play along!

These three little kids were right by me the whole time playing with balloons. They got a kick out of blowing up the balloons and then letting go of the end and letting them deflate while going crazy all over the sky. It was so cute! Toe be a kid again and find joy in the small things in life :)

Sadly a few minutes after this picture was taken this balloon popped in her face.

All the women played volleyball and the guys played soccer. I didn't get any really good pictures of the volleyball because I was playing. I didn't play too long though. After a few bad hits on my part I was motioned off the court and another teacher ran on :)

The two Americans are with me :)