Holiday

I am currently traveling in Europe after I finished a conference I was attending in Budapest, Hungary. I am away from Thailand for two weeks and I will be doing a whirlwind tour of 3 cities: Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Or as they say Budapest, Wein, and Praha. Posts and lots of pictures to come... x

My Class

This is my class! Yes, a full class of students expecting me to teach them English. I've been teaching for about 2 months now on my "free time" which turns out to be about 3 hours a week. I love my students. They are so eager to learn -- they all have worked a full day in the clinic -- dealing with sick patients (see post below) and then voluntarily stay after work to learn English. I generally follow a curriculum already set up by an NGO that works out of Mae Sot, but I change a lot of it to make it more relevant to my students. Two weeks ago I wrote my first exam for them - of which they all passed. Wow does it feel good to be a teacher :)

The other pictures above are shots of the motorbike ride I take to get to the clinic. During this season they burn all of the fields to clear them before the rainy season. Leads to very polluted air and beautiful orange sunsets. Wait 6 weeks and all of this will be green, and no more pollution in the air. Goodbye to slash and burn. Pics to come!

A bit of education

This video report comes from the Thai-Burma (Myanmar) border and is completely filmed in the clinic that work in 3 days a week. Many of the local staff that you see in the video I work with and teach English to. All of the women and children that you see in the video are an everyday sight - nothing was staged about this video, the clinic is overcrowded, people do walk for days to get to it and then sit in the hot 100 degree weather for hours to be seen.