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My last week at Nong Kha proved to be the most amazing week on this trip so far. On Monday we had a pretty typical day i showed the new american teacher around the school and the homestay. Then he watched me teach some classes. On Tuesday it was national boy scout day in thailand so the students had a massive marching ceremony at the school. It was quite funny to watch all the students marching around the field and the teachers screaming thai army instructions at them. I of course was sat that the head of the ceremony and had to sit there while all the students marched by and saluted me and the heads of the school. I then spent the rest of the day being taken around different schools to teach while mike (The new american teacher) stayed and taught at Nong Kha. That Evening the teachers took Mike and I to a resturant in a town about 30 mins away. We had a delisious meal which was like a thai fondu and of couse there was a lot of thai whiskey consumed It was a blast!!! Wednesday was just a really great day. We were taken in
the morning to one of the teachers farms where we spent about two hours working in the rice fields. This was more of a teaching experience to us forigiener than us actually farming. I learned pretty quickly however that i am not a very good rice planter as i am extremely slow, in fact i was so slow that the 12 year old students were beating me and the farmers just laughed away at me. However i did redeam myseft as i was pretty amazing at driving the rice tractor. After working in the feilds we came back to the home stay and took the longest bucketing ever. You get pretty dirty working in a rice field. In the afternoon the factulty and students had prepared a buddish ceremony for Mike, myself, and a new thai teacher. The ceremony was to welcome the new thai teacher and Mike and to say goodbye to me. The ceremony consisted of alot of prayers and then a beautiful thai dance which was preformed by some of the students. After the Danceing a religious man did a blessing ritual of us, during which we had to kneel for like 30 mins. This was no
problem for me but Mike with his big legs keep falling and just could not sit right. He had the entire audience laughing during the ceremony it was pretty funny. After the blessing all the students came up and tied little bracelets around our wrists which are ment to be signs of good luck. It took forever to get all the students up and by the end my wrists looked like they had been bandaged.
That night after the ceremony the director of the school organized a dinner party complete with Karoke for the 3 of us. This party however was not nearly as much fun as the party the night before because their were many important people from the village and not everyone was on their best behavior. For most of the night Mike and I where paraded around the room to talk with different people from the surrounding villages. Near the end of the night Mike and I where forced to do some Karoke songs which of course we butchered. However I was really disapointed that no other teachers got up to sing, it made us look even worse. After the music ended everyone cleared out very
The Blessing Ceremony
HAHA - Look at Mikes Legs - It was so funny watching him in pain - Sorry MIKE! quickly which i was fine with me because after all that had happend during the day i was exhausted.
On Friday I taugh one class and had another short goodbye ceremony where i present the director with the money that we raised. He was extremly happy as were all the teachers. The rest of the day was spent saying my goodbyes and getting gifts from the different teachers. I also gave my host famuly some small gifts that i had brought from australia. This turned out to be a bad idea as the main guy that had been looking after me (Mr. Sun) got extemely upset when he didnt have a gift for me. I tried to explain that it was a gift for taking care of me but i think it was lost in translation. After this i became really quite emotional and really sad to leave these people. i have only know them for a month and with most of them i could barely communicate with but they were some of the best people and friend i have ever met in my life. I really and truely will miss them greatly!
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