All the gross animal abuse of the fair...

---

I’ve had major connection issues in the last couple of days, so this blog is something of an amalgamation of what’s been going on in our second week at Klong Nam Sai School. One thing that has really struck us is how exhausting teaching is - we are teaching 2-3 hours a day (plus some time spent preparing) and typically finish up lying on our backs, in dire need of some kind of sports drink. Yet the teachers here, particularly the indomitable E, seem to have limitless reserves energy - perhaps this is something we need to cultivate (particularly Wiz with her career plans). That said, it is sweat-drippingly hot which is something we aren’t used to; maybe in the cooler climes of England the Thai teachers would freeze over while we’d happily go about our teaching - somehow I doubt it though.

We’ve spent the last five evenings with the Na Long Chai family at a big fairground in Sa Kaeo (about 50km from Aranya Prathet) where the Klong Nam Sai tah koh (henceforth ‘takraw’, as that turns out to be the correct spelling) team has been playing in a tournament. They kept winning, and therefore we got to go back every night and eat more junk food than Rick Waller, play bingo and a new game entitled ‘spot the lady boy’ (last night I managed seven, a personal best). The fair also hosts two large elephants to whom fair-goers feed tiny chunks of bamboo. They are very sad beasts, who seem to be badly affected by the loud music and the unfulfilling lifestyle of trudging round at their keepers’ beck and call. I kept expecting to hear the sound of trampled Thai as one of them loses its rag and breaks for safety.

The fair also means we get to hang around with Mr Na Long Chai’s wife, Pi Tuy, who is, without exaggeration, an incredible human being. Imagine Mary Poppins crossed with Yoda and you might be getting somewhere near the reality of her, but suffice to say: she is brilliant, and keeps us very entertained and embarrassingly well fed. In fact I am now sporting such a paunch that it has drawn comments from numerous members of the teaching faculty; I plan to keep on growing it so that when I come home I can wear dark glasses and walk around without being recognized.

As a bit of a change, a couple of days ago we helped out a girl with a speech she was giving to some sort of dignitary who was due to visit the school. It was quite rewarding to be able to give one-on-one advice to a student who genuinely wanted it (usually the students are pretty keen in our lessons, but we still aren’t sure if it’s just the novelty of having two pale-skinned, freakishly-gangly farang up at the front of the class rather than the quality of our teaching). When it came to the crunch this morning she did really well although I have my doubts as to whether her performance mattered all that much; the addressees of the speech didn’t seem to speak any English themselves, and anyway it is pretty obvious that the main criterion for a student’s being chosen to welcome a guest is aesthetic rather than intellectual. The sample of girls chosen to do the greeting was about as representative as an East African ‘democracy’. (You might now accuse me of spending the morning lusting after 17 year old girls, but that would be unfair. It wasn’t the whole morning.)

Yesterday we had a free day - we did, honestly, try to get some lessons but the teachers were insistent that we ‘take a lest’ (Thai pronunciation of ‘rest’). We were hardly going to argue with that in this rainforest-like heat and humidity, but it did lead us to speculate what exactly the school gets out of our presence on days where we do little to no teaching (especially since on these days we are still given full room and board). I think the answer lies in the fact that we aren’t just here for the students (which we’d prefer) but also for the reputation of the school as a whole. Hence we have been wheeled out in front of various directors and governors who are presumably impressed by Klong Nam Sai’s entrepreneurial spirit in attracting volunteer teachers.

Having said that, if yesterday was a rest day, this morning was quite the converse, with lessons in periods 1, 2 and 3. In Period 2 we helped E’s class revise the ‘present simple tense’ One thing we’ve noticed is the paucity of our own knowledge of grammar - present simple? Future continuous? Past participle? These are like a foreign language - a reflection of English teaching methods in England perhaps. However we’re learning fast and now know all about non-restrictive relative clauses and subjunctive condintionals; important weapons in the language teacher’s arsenal.

In periods 1 and 3 we tried out teaching through the medium of music. In other words, we brought in our ukulele and played songs for the students, getting them to fill in the blanks on pre-printed lyric sheets and then sing along with us. We started by playing them a song each and getting them to vote which they wanted to learn (my ‘Yellow Submarine’ was roundly trounced by Wiz’s ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’, although I think they just didn’t appreciate the subtle nuances of my rich baritone vocals) and proceeded from there. It was great fun and we even got given heart-shaped chocolate as a token of the affections of the female members of the class.

In other news, we now share our room with a large cricket whom we’ve affectionately named John; he joins Gordon the Gecko in the panoply of wildlife flittering in and around our guesthouse. Yesterday we saw our first caning, given by the school ‘disciplinary officer’, a terrifying looking man with gaunt, sallow features and greasy hair cascading from an atrocious centre parting - a face that might appear on a sex offenders’ register, if ever there were one. We voiced our disapproval to E, but she was adamant that this is the ‘best way’ with the students here; we still aren’t convinced.

Oh, and by the way, last night we saw the school takraw team triumph in the final of the tournament we’ve been attending all week. It’s a mark of how attached we already feel to the school that this was one of the most enthralling sporting occasions of my life; if we had seats we would have been on the edge of them as Klong Nam Sai sneaked a three-set victory.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a game of scrabble to get to. Wiz won the last game with a score of 326, albeit with some dubious use of the Thai learner’s dictionary. I’m now out to exact revenge. Wish me luck!

---