At work and play

Here we are at “work”, though it doesn’t feel much like work! So far we have been observing in the four centres that we will be working closely with, making an initial assessment of current practice and areas for development. But of course, you can’t really just observe, without joining in…

Even with no shared language, you can still enjoy sharing books together. There is a real scarcity of books for the children to look at in these centres. One of the reasons given is that they do not look after them. Surely they can be taught to look after them, Heather thinks to herself….

Here I was given the job of squeezing limes to go in a juice drink that the teacher was making from the petals of a purple flower. Now, I know Health and Safety in the UK has gone a bit mad, but here we have the other extreme. This activity involved boiling up a pan of water on an electric stove on the low table that the children were all gathered round. They were all very attentive to start with, but after a while became more and more restless and fidgety and I was on tenterhooks the whole time, thinking “That’s a pan of boiling water on the table that these children are jostling.” The teacher seemed oblivious. To think of the risk assessment forms she’d have had to fill in in the UK!

 

Here we are singing a song about washing hands. I learned the actions, if not the words!

 

 

My coordinator has turned out to be a natural with the children, and joins in their games with great enthusiasm! His language skills (Burmese, Thai and Karen) mean he is able to communicate with them more directly than I can, though usually when involved in a shared activity, spoken language turns out not to be so essential after all.

These two little girls seemed to take a particular liking to him!

 

Last Sunday I went with Alice to have a look at the Reclining Buddha in a temple just near the border at the other end of town. There are quite a few temples in different styles here – Thai, Burmese, Chinese. Apart from the one where I gate-crashed their Songkran party in April, I haven’t really explored any of them. I should make the effort to do so!

This week another VSO ECD volunteer who is based in Ranong in the south of the country (about 16 hours away on the bus – Thailand is very long!) has come to visit Alice and see what she is doing in the migrant learning centres here. So on Tuesday evening Alice invited us all round, ECD advisers plus co-ordinators, for dinner. The rain held off and we were able to sit outside in what used to be called the “VSO compound” back in the days when there were about a dozen VSO volunteers in Mae Sot and three of them lived in the three houses in this little compound.

The coordinators making themselves useful!!

 

Great food and wonderful company!

 

This weekend I am off to Chiang Mai. I have joined the committee of the VSO 1% Fund. The other three committee members all live in Chiang Mai, so committee meetings have been easy to arrange up till now. Monday and Tuesday are public holidays for Buddhist Lent, so I am able to go for a long weekend. I will travel on Saturday (about 6 hours on the bus) and return on Tuesday. We have planned a meeting for Monday morning, and the rest of the time I will be able to explore Chiang Mai. I am looking forward to the break and change of scene.