Laundry Experiences

Hello Everyone,

Today was back to work for Misty and I, however it was not a bad day as I only had my morning English Adult class as my other students did not show. I found out later that one of the students started school again today so we need to rearrange my schedule again to accommodate her new time. This afternoon we had a meeting with the new volunteer coordinator. Hopefully with her we will be able to plan things better. We are looking at trying to get internet access here at Soi 40. Misty and I need to look into how much it will cost a month. I do not think we need to do much convincing as the house parents who just moved here already put in their arguments. The volunteer coordinator is also looking into getting some recreation materials donated such as balls and hoola hoops. Right now we only have one ball to use with over 50 children, and that is only when we can find the ball. There are only so many versions of tag we can actually play.

We met the children from the Southern Part of Thailand, Phuket. These students were affected by the tsunami that hit Thailand. They will be staying with us for a month and Misty and I will be teaching them English. They were a lot older than we expected, but we are going to have to do an initial assessment to see where their English level is at. We both have suspicions that they may be able to read and write more than they can actually speak it, if they can speak it at all.

We are booking our tickets tomorrow for Chaing Mai. We are going to the Northern Part of Thailand for Songkran. We are flying out on April 11 and coming home on April 21. Right now we are considering Burma and Laos as two more of our stops as they are so close. We are only going to miss two days of teaching to add a few extra days on to make it the whole 10 day trip, which we are pretty excited for. However this is going to be one of our bigger trips which means we are really going to have to watch our spending for the rest of our time here.

The weather here seems to be getting hotter by the day. Sometime next week it is supposed to be the hottest day of the year. Oh boys I can’t wait. I already find this heat, in the high 40’s plus humidity sometimes unbearable.

I started a new book this weekend as I finished “Mr. Pip” a while ago. The book was really good and I am kind of glad I read it while here as it helped me to see a lot of things differently, being an educated white person is an Asian country. (Mr. Pip is the only white person and he educates the students of the island by reading Charles Dickens. Right now I am reading “Teacher Man” by Frank McCourt. We read a couple of chapters out of this book for various classes this year and each time I was eager to read more so I decided, I should just read the whole book. It is also a more uplifting read in comparison to all of the abuse stories I have been reading and now meeting children who have experienced it.

Tonight we attempted to do our laundry in the machine. The machines here are nothing like those in Canada and do not have as much power. The water in this building is terrible, and there are wash bins full of water everywhere just incase you need water and there is none. Well tonight when we went to do our laundry there was no water, so we literally scooped buckets of water into the washing machine so that we had enough water to run a load. I think it would have been a lot easier and faster to wash it by hand like we have done with some of our things, elbow grease and a brush. Now that’s low-so.