I was happy
to return to Ban Huay Sala School. We
were with the 17-year-old son of a Korean donor, who wanted to show the
students how to make kimchi and take pictures. Kuhn San Hun, the school's head English,
teacher told us that he wanted us to give an encore English lesson. I agreed,
but knew it might be hard.
I’d asked to go up country again to observe teacher trainings. No such trainings materialized
as my departure date arrived. As we set up our lesson plans the next day, my
supervisor announced that I was to attend a training at another school.
As I said goodbye to
the students, they seemed happy that the other interns would remain, but were
disappointed at my departure. Surprisingly, so was I. I’d only spent a few days
teaching here. It was the closest I’d come to making an impact.
I boarded the van, watched the fields roll by and thought about letting the students know they
could come visit me when they got a bit older. Then I thought better of it.
When I was around 14 I went skiing in British Columbia, and took tropical
vacations in the BVI. It occurred to me
that most of them would probably never leave Thailand. Its improbable that
people from such different cultural, linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds
could make any kind of connection. I’d like to think we did.
I only stayed at the teacher training about 45 minutes.
Obviously, the training was in Thai; no one was sent with me to translate.
The local English instructor gave me and a visiting American teacher a ride back. He told us that our visits to schools do work
in that they really make the children want to learn English. The visiting
teacher said she’d been told to teach English by my organization, as the local
teacher watched best practices. The only problem that she happened to be a literature
teacher! “I don’t know what they’re
thinking” she said. “Frankly, I think
it’s insulting to the teachers and the children.”
It’s better than
nothing. Although both English teachers I saw on this trip speak well, others can’t
even hold a basic conversation. The question still remains: Why wern't we sent
to a school were the faculty’s English level is a problem?
I did teach English the next day. The students were happy to
see me. But, they seemed a bit jaded. In the month after my organization’s
program started they’d seen a virtual parade of westerners tour their school.
In older projects, the students practically ignore our continued visits.
Later that day, a
younger intern was trying to figure out what benefit learning photography could
be to the villagers. I had to break the news to him. “He’s the son of the
village’s sponsors” I informed him. “The benefit is his family’s continued
sponsorship”.
We attended a tree
planting the next day. Villagers receive 40 baht (about 60 U.S. cents) per tree
toward capital in their micro-credit bank. We bounced over dirt paths through
the rice paddies until we finally arrived at the site. I’d expected the
villagers to regard our presence as interference. They couldn’t have been more
welcoming. At one point, an old woman came
over and cut open my tree’s plastic root lining. “She is 80 years old” a
translator told me. In an odd way she reminded me of my grandmother, who taught
me to garden as a child. We worked as a team until lunch.
The villagers served us on reed mats under older trees. The Koreans demanded the villagers bring their lunch to where we left
our van. But, they are the ones providing the 40 baht per tree. We eventually convinced them to walk to where
we had stopped planting.
This was likely my last trip to Buriram. I am going to miss
it. The trip encompassed the best of what my organization does for rural
villagers. But is it enough? Is it counterproductive? Or is it effective
NGO work?
You decide.
No comments:
Post a Comment