Camping

It's pretty easy to get set up in Isaan. We always stay in the same house--we just seem to change rooms every year. Kruu Rerai is our woman of peace so to speak. She's been the one to faithfully invite us every year. She enjoys that we teach English, but she also has at least at some point in her life been interested in the Gospel. We live a lot of life at her house, and we're really thankful for her family's hospitality.

We get to work teaching the kids and playing basketball with them. It always seems to take a little bit for the kids to start warming up to us.  They feel kind of shy and nervous when we first start, but by the end of the first week they're starting to fall back into the groove.

 This year we split up into two groups with Rusty, Pawn, & Mimi being one group and Drew, Kaimook, and I being the second group. Our group mostly taught the middle school students while Rusty's group taught the elementary kids. We both had an intensive class for one hour a day. While the rest of us taught basketball, Rusty continued to teach English in the afternoons.

We try to make the English classes fun with games, activities, and songs. Some of the older classes don't want to speak, but overall I thought they did a good job. Rusty was really impressed with the younger kids.
We teach basketball to the kids as well. For the elementary classes, we try to do a lot of ball-handling drills, fundamentals like dribbling, passing, and shooting, and games to make it more fun and interesting. For the middle school students we try to move them through the skills pretty quickly because we all know playing the game is the exciting part. Their skills are not improving as much as I would like for them to so the games can be pretty crazy, but I figure there's only so much we can do when we only have them two or three hours for basketball.

After the basketball hours, school dismissed an hour early so the teachers could have an hour of English as well. This year the principal made it mandatory for all of the teachers to attend. I have never seen so much nervousness, but they really did a good job! The numbers dwindled a bit as the time went on, but that's completely normal. We had one teacher we nicknamed Mr. Encyclopedia. If you needed to know anything, you could just ask him. Rusty did one activity where each student had to pick a famous person to come to speak to their class. Then they formed groups and had to convince their group to invite that person. Mr. Encyclopedia's group picked Kofi Anan. Other groups picked superstars, but Mr. Encyclopedia's group picked an intellectual.

After we finish the classes, we usually have some down time, but it's not really down time. We go to the market twice a week, visit Mr. Niyom's farm, cook together, and teach another class in the evening.  I think they like to take us to the farm so that Pawn can climb the trees for the fruit. :) She likes to do it. We also took a look at the rubber trees that were planted last year. They said the one that Rusty planted is doing really well. He was joking about it producing white rubber.



The class in the evenings is not really anything difficult; we just play games with whatever students come over to visit with us. Last year Khruu Rei invited the kids over, but this year she just left it up to them. You can tell that we had a pretty good turnout. We played lots of games including Poor Kitty, Murder She Winked, and water balloon volleyball. I think the kids enjoyed it, and they're keeping up with us even now that we're back in Chiang Mai.