Ranong visit

The blog has been sadly neglected for a while, so here is a whistle-stop tour of what I have been up to:

Saturday 22 Feb: Travelled to Bangkok on the day bus.

Sunday 23 Feb: Routine medical and dental appointments. I can now hear again after having had my ears cleaned out!

Monday 24 Feb: VSO meeting for ECD volunteers to discuss project progress and plans for the remaining 10 months. We are a rapidly dwindling band. One of the volunteers that I started with had only signed up for a year, so she has just left, and the other one left her placement early some months ago. There are now just four of us - Alice and me in Mae Sot and Jennel and Wim in Ranong. Wim's placement finishes at the end of this month, but he is planning to stay on and continue to work alongside Jennel until the end of the project. The VSO governance programme is finishing at the end of March, which means only the ECD project is still active. So, officially there will just be three of us - the last remaining VSO volunteers in Thailand!!
After the meeting, we all took the night bus from Bangkok to Ranong to spend the rest of the week visiting the project there. We were accompanied by Alice's coordinator and her recently appointed teacher support assistant, who she is training up to be able to continue similar support work in migrant learning centres when the project finishes.

 

Tuesday 25 Feb: Arrived in Ranong around 6am and got a couple of hours' sleep before setting off at nine to visit two of the migrant learning centres that Jennel and Wim work with.

MMR Learning Centre (Marist Mission Ranong - not Measles, Mumps, Rubella!)
This centre is well-funded and resourced and supports community health and education initiatives as well as the core school activities. They have a new building, constructed one year ago.

Wattana Learning Centre - this centre is more typical of the learning environment for many migrant children. The entire school is housed in a single-roomed building, with partial partitions to separate one class from another. As the usual teaching and learning style consists of chanted repetition, the noise level quickly becomes cacophonous. One wonders how students are able to focus on what is happening in their class and cut out everything else. And any child with hearing difficulties would be completely lost!

After lunch, we were allowed the afternoon off to recuperate from the journey! Later, Jennel took us to visit the Ranong hot springs.

We decided we could sell this photo to skincare product companies, to advertise either tanning or whitening lotion, depending which direction you read it!

I should hasten to add that the water we had our feet in was NOT at 65 degrees!! It was still pretty hot, though.

 

The hot water beneath the ground heats the floor here. People come to lie down and ease their aching joints and muscles. Personally, I found it slightly too hot!

 

We also visited this golden Buddha nearby

 

Wednesday 26 Feb: Bangnon Learning Centre – caters for children from 4 years up to 14/15. There are only four teachers, so many of the students are taught in mixed-grade classes. We observed Jennel team teaching with the KG1 teacher – first a practical maths lesson using physical activity to reinforce counting skills and later an art lesson.

 

 

 

Thursday 27 Feb: Bangklan Learning Centre – caters for around 80 students from KG to Grade 4. The building is within the compound of a Thai school, though it seems the two schools remain very separate, with little interaction or collaboration between them. Some migrant children do attend the Thai school, and it is hoped that all the children will eventually be able to transfer.

 

 

 

The future of many migrant learning centres in the border areas between Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) is very uncertain. Many of the donors and agencies that work with the migrant communities (including VSO) are shifting their attention to Burma now that the country is opening up more, with the result that funding for migrant issues in the border region is decreasing. However, it is unlikely that there will be a large scale return of the migrant population to Burma while the situation there for the various ethnic groups remains uncertain. In Mae Sot, there is an emergency situation at the moment, with many migrant learning centres threatened with imminent closure.

 

Friday 28 Feb: We had a day off and hired the songthaew driver who had been ferrying us around to the learning centres to take us to the beach, about an hour's drive away.

 

 Our trusty driver

 

It was far too hot to sit on the beach itself, as there was no shade, which explains why it was utterly deserted! We sat and relaxed in the shade of a wooded park area at the top of the beach.

 

Lunch!

 

Saturday 1 March: Alice and I had decided to splash out and pay the extra to fly back, rather than face the 24 hour journey by bus (day bus to Bangkok, followed by night bus to Mae Sot.) Instead, we were back by lunchtime, after two 1-hour flights and a couple of hours waiting at Bangkok. I was very relieved to discover that the water supply problems that I had been experiencing in the week before I left seem to have been resolved, at least for the moment.

 

This week it is back to business as normal at the centres, except it is anything but normal, as end of year events keep popping up unexpectedly and putting a spanner in the works of our plans! We have discovered that the centres will be closed for most of next week, as the teachers are required to attend a provincial level sports event in Tak, the provincial capital. This is a sports event for teachers, not children. First time I've heard of anything like that!!