Make Way for the Ducklings, and yoga in longyis

Tuesday

­­This noon Ollie, the German teacher I’d met earlier, invited the teachers to lunch at a nearby restaurant

crossing 19th St

in honor of his mother whose funeral he had just returned from, so I joined them; and this evening one of the women teachers, Roma, accompanied me to a noodle shop across the street after an evening class where we had Shan noodles.

She invited me to breakfast in her dorm room tomorrow. The women and girls cook rice, meat and vegetables in their rooms or in rice cookers on the veranda for their meals, supplemented sometimes by food from the stalls outside.

There’s a little half hour yoga class that meets with about a dozen teachers/staff in longyi (it was hard for me to imagine doing yoga in longyi, but it worked okay), along with the monk principal in the office at 8:30pm, led by a Myanmar teacher counting to ten in German (my guess is the simple routine of yoga-based exercises was probably taught to them by one of the German volunteers).  Talked a bit more with the principal, who asked me a little about IBEC, and said that in this school they encouraged free thinking among the children and students, while IBEC has a more traditional approach.  The library 9pm class didn’t meet tonight, as the teacher had to go back to her village this morning, at least that’s what a student told me when I inquired at their hostel when I didn’t find anyone in the library. 

Wednesday

Searching the library last night for more books for my classes, I found a copy of Make Way for the Ducklings here too, and also found a little book focused on S words called “Sammy Snake”!  So since I’d been drawing Sammy Snake the last couple days in my classes, I took out the book to share with them, which I did today in the 3^rd grade and ethnic children classes, having them raise their hands every time they heard an “S”.

 

"Golden House" class

This afternoon also taught the children an hour in the afternoon at the “Golden House” (previously called the Nargis hostel but the children there changed the name to Golden House as they didn’t want to keep hearing about Nargis), and then tonight again in the library with about a dozen of the ethnic and orphan children, which is my favorite class: they are very attentive, and their English is not as good as the others and so whatever contribution I’m making feels more valuable. 

evening library class with ethnic/orphan children

The last two evenings I’ve also gone with Roma to her evening class with young adults, and it was good experiencing some of the game activities and warmers she mixes In with the class that I had read about in my online class. She did a warmer where students had a sheet of paper with questions they had to go around asking other students to find ones who fit the category (eg. Find someone who:  loves dogs, is wearing a ring, has been at the school for two years, etc, etc).  I helped her today: she made little slips of paper with questions for the students who had drawn Q slips of paper (designating them as the ones who ask the question) that at my suggestion included words ending with plural S’s.  Then they lined up in opposite roles, and each pair came down to the end of the rows to ask and respond to the question.  I invited people to listen for missed S’s and raise their hands when they heard one, but mostly they didn’t hear them, though most missed them. Missing 3^rd person verb S’s was incidentally the main mistake from their papers that the teacher had announced at the classes’ beginning.  And of course the teacher herself omitted her final S’s when talking with the students about asking the questions.

spelling game in evening library class

 After tonight’s class Roma and another teacher go teach youth from primary to young adult level who are not able to go to school because they must work at tea shops to help their families.  Tomorrow afternoon she is going to take me to Mandalay Hill.

some of ethnic and orphan children after evening class

 

The day classes are a real challenge for me as the school building is very noisy and echoes, and the children themselves so loud that today I put tissue paper in my ears, and it is often challenging to keep side conversations down so that I can be heard.  The third grade class, which I meet with twice, is sweet, though, even if deafening when they greeted me on arrival, a bevy of them rushing around to embrace me; and the girls writing “I love you” on the class drawings that they give me (after reading a story I’ve been having them draw a picture, so now I have a stack of pictures of three bears, Sammy the Snake, and duckling families….)    The 4^th grade class I asked to change to a higher grade as yesterday I couldn’t get enough quiet to be able to work with them at all; the 8^th grade class I brought again to a quieter room and that went well, and I’ll see about the 6^th and 7^th grade classes tomorrow. 

evening library class

I miss having a place of quiet to be able to go to, and look forward to my day back at IBEC.  It’s a little ironic since having the week here was one of the factors in my staying, but it’s good to have come now for that week rather than planning a whole trip around coming back for a month next year.  Not that it’s not that it’s not a great school to volunteer at: it definitely is.  Everyone is very helpful, too, around helping me arrange classes that work for me, such as setting up the ethnic children class and the golden house class in the afternoons, providing me the small library/teachers' space for meeting with the 8^th grade, and helping me change the 4^th grade class to a 7^th grade class. I had thought, though, there would be more contact with the other volunteers, but I don’t even see them at the lunch that is served for us. However, today there was one I’d not met before (from Florida but he's been working in Asia for the last twenty years or so), who next year will be volunteering at an NGO in Pudicherry (what used to be Pondicherry when I was there in 1968) in India.

Honey (the children all have English names too) in computer office

So the trip ends a little on the slow side in one way, though very busy in another, in that I’m spending a lot of free time on the internet, unsuccessfully trying to download an airport-reading book for my kindle, researching Bangkok river trips to Ayutthaya, and going through months of email, etc. 

It’s a little overwhelming reading  email again, on top of the Myanmar newspaper, alerting me with urgent emails to all the problems in the world.  You get a little sheltered from everything when you’re not looking at the news and email petitions…. 

Overall, I’m not sure how much of any substance I have contributed in my time here: I don’t think people not dropping their S’s is very significant in the big picture.  Maybe little Thar Nyi Bwya will remember Bambi’s mother when he’s a soldier and won’t massacre any mothers: that could be a contribution ….. 

Anyway, lots of love to all of you,

Zoe