Early enthusiasm

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This first entry comes from the Soundlab of Klongnamsai Wittayakarn High School, the improbably-named place in which we are spending the next four weeks as volunteer English teachers. To give you a bit of context, we’ve spent the last two weeks marauding around Laos, where our most strenuous activity involved floating down a river in an inflated rubber ring, supping dirt-cheap Beer Lao and occasionally stopping to hurl ourselves into the water from impossibly tall and rickety wooden structures on rope swings, trapezes and zipwires. For this reason, the return to some semblance of routine has been something of a kick in the teeth, if not a full-blown haymaker to the jaw.

Our volunteer experience was presaged by an overnight rail journey from Vientiane to Bangkok, most notable for the fact that seemingly the entire staff of the Thai national railway were summoned to fix one of our bunks, which had become wedged in its wall cavity. Although they seemed to be about as mechanically-minded as Graham Norton, they eventually cracked it, and we were soon snoozing soundly (well, Mike was. Wiz slept like an insomniac on amphetamines). At any rate, we arrived in Bangkok’s Hualamphong Station at 6.30am, and headed straight for the Khao San Road to stock up on a couple of essentials. I was shorn like an oddly-shaped sheep, my flowing gingerish locks and abundant facial hair reduced to a close crop which apparently makes my head look small and my cheeks look fat - such is the lot of the volunteer teacher.

By 1pm, we were on a bus to Chaiyaphum, where we would meet the family of the Thai bride of the American chap who set up Volunthai, the charity which arranged our teaching placements. En route, I casually looked at the map only to find that Chaiyaphum lies on the same line of longitude as Vientiane and Bangkok, almost exactly equidistant between the two - so we could have saved six hours of our lives by going straight there from Vientiane. Still, we were pleased to arrive to a greeting from the diminutive matriarch of the Pataphong family, and enjoyed an evening of excellent food and an induction into Thai culture and language. While I can’t pretend we became fluent in Thai overnight, we did learn to avoid such terrible social faux pas as eating with your fork (you eat with the spoon, and use the fork as a kind of shovel) and taking more than one dish onto your plate at any one time (which they described as ‘American style’).

No sooner (it seemed) than we’d hit the sack, we were being woken to attend a Buddhist ceremony which, so far as I could make out from the hosts’ limited English (and our frankly appalling Thai) was in honour of ‘some monks in India’. For one heart-stopping moment I thought we were going to be asked to introduce ourselves to the crowd of inquisitive monks, but luckily we were just pointed at a lot, and soon enough we were on the road again (only seven hours this time) to our school in Aranya Prathet.

Aranya Prathet, according to the Lonely Planet, is a town which ‘the savvy traveler arrives at early, and leaves quickly’. Hardly a glowing review of our home for the next month; and, indeed, we had (very briefly) been there before on the way to Cambodia (it is just a few kilometres from the border), and the brief glimpse we got of it then was fairly uninspiring. Still, we decided to suspend our cynicism - after all, we didn’t come for the beaches, and a good thing to, since there aren’t any here. We were met from the bus by Pi Bong Sorn, the director of the school, who immediately took us to the kind of motel in which a multiple murder might take place. This, he informed us, would be our home for the next four weeks. Specifically, we’ve been given a one-room bedsit which lacks such basic amenities as a sink, a bin and any obvious way of flushing the toilet. Still, the bedroom-cum-living room-cum-kitchen is bright and spacious and it will be nice not to be on the move for a while. By the time we’d had dinner near the Aranya Prathet (Aran to the locals) night market, illuminated by streetlights in honour of the unspecified Buddhist holiday mentioned above, we felt quite at home; our companions for dinner, Pi Bawng Sorn and Pi Na Long Chai (another teacher at the school, who lives across the road from our bedsit) were very welcoming and even treated us to an assortment of Thai desserts after dinner. We retired to bed looking forward to our first day at school.

Having nodded off at the frankly embarrassing time of 8.30pm, we had no problem getting up for 7.30am to get our lift to school from Mr Na Long Chai, and his garrulous wife Pi Tuy, about whom you will hear more. We sat in the back of the car as Pi Tuy gave us a lesson in rudimentary Thai, made more amusing by her similarly rudimentary grasp of English. Klong Nam Sai School is about 14km from Aran town; it has about 650 students from 13-18, and - according to the director - they are all very, very poor, so we at least feel like we are doing a pretty good deed. At any rate, I can only remember fragmentary images of the first couple of hours; being shepherded into the staff room to eat a breakfast of chicken and rice (madness), sitting in assembly (outdoors, apparently the students complain when it gets too hot, making me wonder just how hot we’re going to find it), watching errant schoolboys have their heads shaved in front of the assembly because their hair exceeded the required maximum length. Because it was our first day, we didn’t do any teaching for ourselves, but we sat in on a couple of lessons given by Pi Nik, a fine woman on the English staff who, in passing, told us to watch out for Cambodians, who come over the border to steal people’s dogs. In the last period of the day, we attempted to play volleyball with some of the students, with about as much grace as a lame elephant (and, incidentally, we did see an elephant kicking back on the roadside on our drive home). All in all, a good first day: the staff are extremely friendly, and while the students seem to find our presence hilarious rather than educational so far, we finished the school day optimistic about the coming weeks.

We drove home with Mr Na Long Chai, with his spouse in similarly loquacious form

As we headed back we noticed a couple of bikes in the boot, which turned out to be at
our disposal during our time at the school. Although, for us, they are like those tiny bikes that clowns ride in the circus, the gesture was much appreciated as was the invitation to play ‘tah koh’ (or Thai kickball) that evening. After an hour’s rest, we rode our bikes down to the local tah koh court, following Mr NLC, spouse and daughter all one motorbike. Tah Koh is a mixture between keepy-uppy and volleyball, played with a ball intricately woven from bamboo. We started out just keeping it up in a circle, Mr NLC and his daughter both proving to be fantastically adept, Armitage and Brownlee much, much less so. I had no problem just treating the ball as a football, but as more and more competitors turned up I was told, nay, ordered not to use to front of my foot but only the side because ‘this isn’t soccer’. Just as we were preparing to leave, a particularly cheery gentleman turned up and suggested I join them in a proper game, played three-a-side over a volleyball-esque net. I put in a reasonable performance, but was astounded by the skill of some of the other participants, who demonstrated spectacular scissor kicks and the ability to get seemingly unreturnable shots back into play. One to practice, I think.

After the game the Na Long Chai family took us for ice cream, followed by dinner in the town. The spouse, who is, quite possibly, the nicest woman in the world, festooned us with strawberries and oranges to take back to the room, and we went to bed stuffed but delighted with the first day.

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Day 2 saw us do our first teaching, a nerve-wracking experience to say the least. The first period was with Pi Nik, who wanted us to teach the class about various niceties of English manners. Yesterday, we had observed a lesson in which they’d watched a video, where an absurdly coiffured man named Tony Carney and his cartoon sidekick, Pandy, instructed the students the correct way to use the phrases ‘welcome’ and ‘you’re welcome’, and not to call people fat as a form of small talk. Today, with me playing Tony Carney to Wiz’s Pandy, we went over the material with the same class. The ‘team teaching’ approach seemed to work well, with Pi Nik explaining anything that we couldn’t communicate in English. The students seem to be very well-behaved (or perhaps just nervous of ‘falang’, their much-used phrase for ‘foreigner’), but not especially enthusiastic about English, but we got them playing a game and they seemed to enjoy it. After a free period, we repeated the trick with a bottom-set class of much younger pupils, teaching them how to conjugate the verb ‘to do’. The teacher claimed we had done a better job than him, but he was just being polite: we have a long way to go.

We ate lunch with a few teachers in a restaurant nearby, and returned to the Soundlab, from where I write this entry. The afternoon so far has been an afternoon off, which suits us fine: Wiz lazing, me writing a blog entry that is surely far too long already. I leave you with the interesting transliterative fact that ‘Louisa’ sounds like the Thai word for ‘pussycat’. It could have been worse: Sophie, apparently, sounds like their word for ‘sanitary napkin’. Over and out.

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