Dog bite photo - viewing optional!

This was my dog bite at its most colourful! The rest of it is hidden behind my knee.  It has almost completely faded now, and I am back to all my normal activities - i.e. aerobics three times a week and showering on two legs! The only thing I am not doing any more is walking round to Alice's. It has transpired that the dog that bit me has puppies at the moment and is being quite aggressive to passers-by. Alice walks that way when we go to aerobics, and several times she has had to fend it off with her big stick!

I finally got round to celebrating my birthday last weekend. I went with a group of friends and colleagues to a coffee shop for afternoon cake! I had an incredibly rich and delicious brownie cheesecake - at last, a worthy replacement for chocolate tiffin!

That was the week that was

And what a week - I am mightily glad that it is finally over!

Monday 9th: Arrived at work to an email from my coordinator, to say he was sick but hoped to be back tomorrow.

Tuesday 10th: No improvement. Starting to get a little concerned - we had set aside this week for going through the workshop in detail and practising the presentation.

Wednesday 11th: Still no coordinator, and no indication of when he might be back. I was very glad that we had already prepared all the resources in plenty of time. Provisional contingency plan put in place in case he was not well enough by the weekend.
p.m. - bitten by a dog on the way home from Alice's. Spent much of the evening at the hospital.

Thursday 12th: Coordinator finally back, though still not completely well, and me limping around on my sore leg. We had a constructive morning going through Day 1 of the presentation. At lunchtime I started feeling unwell with flu-like symptoms - fever, headache, muscle ache. Went home to bed with some paracetamol and the feeble hope that it was not flu but a reaction to the rabies jab.

Friday 13th: Woke up feeling much better, after a really good night's sleep. It was just a mild dose of rabies after all. Went through Day 2 of the workshop. At 3:30, just as we were ready to load all our materials into the WE truck to set up at the venue, the heavens opened and poured and poured and poured.
Having been told we could arrange the room any way we wanted, we arrived to find it all set up very formally boardroom meeting-style, with no option to move the furniture in any way... Not quite what we wanted for our practical, interactive workshop. Nothing to do but make the best of it.

Saturday 14th: Day 1 - We knew the Opening Ceremony would take up time in the morning, with speeches from the various local government officials. We were not really prepared for it to go on right up until morning break time! The rest of the day went very well, and we were able to get through most of what we had planned. The teachers seemed to enjoy and appreciate it.
Back to the hospital at the end of the day to get my second rabies jab. Spent the evening going through the questions from Day 1 and adjusting the Day 2 plan.

Sunday 15th: Took a pre-emptive paracetamol together with my antibiotic after breakfast. Just as I was arriving at the WE office to get the truck to the venue, a dog ran across the road at my motorbike and started chasing me. I could see it in my mirror just behind my right ankle and was bracing myself for a repeat of Wednesday. Thankfully it lost interest as I turned in at WE, but I had to sit on my bike for several minutes while I waited for my legs to stop trembling before I got off. NOT a good start to the day!
Another really good day very well-received. In the Closing Ceremony, one of the head teachers said that our training was very different from anything they had attended before. They were used to training that is very theoretical without much indication about how to apply in the classroom, whereas ours gave practical ideas that they could use. I was so pleased, because that is just what we set out to do. My coordinator did a fantastic job, and we were both really pleased with how it went, after all our hard work planning and preparing. Both absolutely exhausted by the end of it -  had a day off today to recover!

Somewhere in the middle of all that I turned 43, but to be honest I hardly noticed!

Opening Ceremony

Obligatory group photo

 

 

Setting workshop agreement

Shame this photo came out a bit fuzzy. I think it is hilarious - we look like we are doing a double act directing traffic!

Building on what teachers know about Early Childhood Development

 

 

 

 

 

 

These teachers didn't seem very familiar with the idea of water play, but had great fun!

This group were very focused on their creative activity, but came up with a very formulaic result, which is how they tend to teach the children as well. Not much room for individual creativity.

 

Role play also seemed a bit of a challenge, so I joined in this hospital scenario with my dog bite story. I really hammed it up and caused much hilarity.

Teaching through practical activities to support language development, especially for second language learners

 

 

Closing Ceremony and presentation of certificates

Why are Heather's blog posts like buses?

Because you wait ages for one and then three turn up at once!

So, it finally happened. Just when I was beginning to feel that I had pretty much conquered my fear of dogs. I was walking back from Alice's house yesterday evening - a walk of about two minutes that I have done countless times. There are usually a number of dogs along the route. Sometimes they bark, but usually they don't take much notice.

 I spotted one of them lying at the side of the road in the gathering gloom. As I approached, it got up and started to wander across the road in front of me. I moved slightly to one side so that I was not heading straight into its path, and continued walking at the same, steady pace looking straight ahead, as I have trained myself to do.

We passed each other without incident, and I was just congratulating myself on yet another doggy encounter successfully negotiated when I felt a sudden, sharp pain in the back of my leg, just above the knee, and thought "Oh no! I've just been bitten!" I am quite amazed by the calmness of my reaction. I half turned around for a moment, but basically just carried on walking in exactly the same way, while desperately hoping that it would not attack again. It didn't - I think it had run off, cowardly little beast!

I phoned Alice and she came around straight away in the car to take me to the hospital. It doesn't matter what you go there for, they always start by weighing you and taking your blood pressure. I was interested to see that the experience had raised my blood pressure slightly above my usual super-low figure, though my weight remained unchanged!

In my rush to get to the hospital I had forgotten to take my immunisation record with me. I was able to remember exactly when I had my rabies jabs (my arm was incredibly sore at my final VSO training in January after the third injection). However, the doctor also wanted to know when my last tetanus was. I knew it was not more than ten years, as all my jabs were up to date before I came out, but she wanted more specific information. So we decided to do everything else and then go back home to get the information.

I was taken into the treatment room to have the first rabies jab and to have the wound cleaned and dressed. That was fun! I had to take off my trousers, which I was about to do, when the nurse insisted I use a pink sheet sewn into a large tube shape to protect my modesty. I couldn't work out quite what I was meant to do with it, so in the end the nurse held it up while I removed my trousers inside my own mini-changing room! She washed the wound (two puncture holes - nothing major) very thoroughly and dressed it, and instructed me not to get it wet.

We then picked up my medication (antibiotics and painkillers) from the hospital pharmacy, before heading home to get the tetanus information. By the time we got back, probably not much more than 20 minutes later, the doctor I had seen had gone home, and the next one was not due to arrive for another 45 minutes.  The nurse who had done my injection had also "gone out" for 15 minutes, and between them the pharmacist and another nurse did not seem confident to say whether I should have a tetanus booster or not. (Bear in mind that this is a private hospital!)

Eventually the nurse came back, and reassured me that I did not, after all, need a tetanus jab, so I was free to go home and cook myself a rather belated dinner! On Saturday after the workshop I will need to go back to the hospital to get the second rabies jab.

This morning I had the challenge of having a shower and washing my hair without the water running down the back of my leg and wetting the dressings. I fashioned myself a couple of waterproof plasters from plastic bag and sticky tape, and had the shower with one foot raised up on the large water container that I invested in after the floods. Seemed to work ok, but washing the one foot on the floor was a bit tricky!

Today the leg is a bit sore, but I'm basically ok. The thing I am most upset about is that it has sent me right back to square one, or even further, as far as my fear of dogs is concerned. I think that is the end of me just popping round on foot to Alice's house. I'll be getting on my motorbike for a 2-minute journey, which seems crazy, but I do not imagine myself being able to walk past that dog again without showing fear, and if you do that then you're done for! Perhaps I should follow Alice's example and always walk with a stick or an umbrella to ward them off!

Magazine article

Way back in April, VSO asked me to write an article for Education Today about my first few weeks of volunteering, which I duly did. I have finally got round to chasing up what happened to it, and have discovered that it was indeed published back in May! You can read it here. (It is on page 7)

Slight spanner in the works on the workshop front - my coordinator has been off work all week with a bad back. I'm hoping he will be better by the weekend, but we are working on a back up plan just in case. I am very glad that we started planning and preparing well in advance, so all the materials are ready. We had set this week aside for practising the presentation and sorting out any translation difficulties, so I think we are just going to have to accept that it will not be as polished as it might have been. I am heartily looking forward to it being over!

Things I Learned - Volume 4

• Trying to listen to music when it is raining really hard is pointless - you can't hear a thing!
• Defrosting the fridge can provide an additional source of water when the mains supply is cut - waste not, want not!
• There's no point trying to cover your mouth with your hand to cough when you are wearing your bike helmet! (Likewise attempting to scratch an itch on your chin)
• The heavy-duty plastic drinking water barrels look very sturdy, and indeed they are. But if you slip in the rain when carrying a full one home and drop it on the stony ground, it will smash, and the water will go everywhere :-(
• If you fold up your poncho when it is still damp, put it under your motorbike seat and forget about it for a day or two, it will start to go mouldy. However...
• ...Tesco kitchen cleaner/ant killer also works very well for getting mould off a plastic poncho!
• Spending days making workshop resources on a wooden floor is hard on the old knees!
• An advantage of the no-cubicle shower arrangement is that you can dance along to your favourite music while showering without bashing your elbows :-)

Red Tape

In order to remain and work legally in Thailand I have to get my visa extended every 90 days, and this week it came round again. I am very fortunate to be based at an organisation that has staff and procedures in place to support with the whole complicated process, which involves unbelievable amounts of paperwork in the form of photocopied forms and documents, all of which have to be individually signed. So yesterday several of us trouped off to the immigration office to have our mounds of paperwork checked and stamped, before receiving a new stamp in our passports. However, that stamp is only provisional, indicating that an extension has been applied for, and lasts until the end of October. Sometime before then, the confirmation of the extension should come through, at which point the passport can be stamped up until the end of December, and so it goes on...
I take my hat off to the lovely lady whose full time job it is to keep track of the visas and work permits of all the employees. She has organisational skills second to none, which is just as well, or she would have disappeared long ago under a mountain of paper!

On the work front, things are progressing well. We have completed two cycles of visits to the four centres that we are working with, and we are now busy preparing for the workshop that we will be running the weekend after next. As well as the teachers from our four regular centres, teachers from three other centres in one of the sub-district areas will also attend, as will the local ministry education chiefs. No pressure, then! We had not visited the three other centres at all, and we thought it would be a good idea to do so before the workshop, to meet the teachers and introduce ourselves. They are all more remote than the centres we work with on a regular basis, which are all within ten to twenty minutes on the motorbike. So last week we set off with the WE truck into the hills. The route to one of the centres in particular was not unlike a bumpy roller-coaster ride. The road, unpaved and already very hilly and bendy, had been further sculpted by the rainy weather, with one bend where the side of the road had collapsed away completely and a new section of road had been cut into the hillside. More taking-off-of-hats is due to the young driver who negotiated the entire route incredibly carefully and gently.

When we got there, the centre was delightful! A tiny little building, incredibly simple, but so neatly organised and well cared for. The children were very happy and confident - two of the older boys (i.e. 4 years old) were leading the rest of the class in a fantastic dance routine, which of course I had to join in with! (Sadly no pictures of that - I was too busy dancing!)

 

 Much teaching, even of these young children, consists of repetition and chanting . We are planning to introduce some games and practical activities as part of the workshop.

 

The teachers at this centre have created a bright and cheerful environment for the children

 

 

 

No chairs and tables - not that there was much room for furniture anyway!

 

They are fortunate to have a large covered area so the children can play outside, come rain or shine (and here it really is either one or the other!)

The three centres that we visited are all in an area where the population is Thai-Karen. This means that the home language of most of the children and the teachers is Karen, though there are a few migrant children who are Burmese speakers. At school, the official language of instruction is Thai, but the teachers also use Karen and some Burmese to help the children understand. In this respect, the situation is quite different from the other four centres, where the teachers and many of the children are Thai, and there are some migrant children who are either Burmese or Karen speakers. These teachers have an additional challenge on their hands of not being able to communicate with some of the children in their home language. Something else that we will be exploring in the workshop.

The workshop will be quite a challenge to deliver, especially for my coordinator who has to translate between English and Thai, neither of which is his own language. For this reason I started planning it well in advance and have more or less written a script, so he can be prepared. I have also tried to make it as practical as possible, so that there is not too much of us talking. But that is also partly because I am trying to model good early years teaching practice! I just hope I have not been too ambitious with what I have planned, and that the teachers enter into the spirit of it!

For those of you interested in more VSO news, here is the link to The Link!