Where You Been At, Preposition?

I took a long unwanted break from Blogger, mostly due to my increased workload at my two schools. As you know, I've been teaching at a Thai school, "Gain English Easily" it's called, part time. Now I teach a variety of folks. A pair of private lessons, one to a 14 year old who's already smart, learns fast, and one who's 23, learning English for the first time and plans to go to the US. I asked him what he'll do when he gets there in 6 months, and he has no idea. Gotta do some work with this one. I also teach a group of nurses who drive for 3 hours from a mountain village called Wiyah Hang to Chiang Mai for an hour and a half class Saturday night and another one Sunday morning. Chiang Mai is the closest place that teaches English. Still, it puts me on my A game so they get as much out of it as possible. They were half an hour late last class because of traffic but I felt so bad I stayed an extra 45 minutes.

My other school is a little different to teach because they don't speak Thai... It's a 30-40 minute commute outside the city on my motorbike to get to the school, which is on a model organic farm. We're covering prepositions right now, which makes me think of Mom flicking me with a towel every time I deliberately ended a sentence with "at" as a youngster. I just added math to my curriculum because currently I am their sole teacher for, well, everything. If I don't go to school they don't go to school. Although this is an unpaid volunteer position, their unfortunate situation helps me spend more time there than in the Thai school. I stay out there with them occasionally to give them some outside contact, as they are currently limited to themselves, their families, and the few laborers that also work at the organic farm. The last time I was able to stay there, we planted beans in the afternoon along this snaking fish "pond" system they have built, and the beans are now about two feet high. The farm is a small organic island in a sea of chemicals (to take a quote from the local sandwich shop here "A shady island in a sea of rice") that is establishing a small-scale fish farm winding through the property. It's incredible what they've built so far: one very large pond that houses a lot of large fish and a dozen ducks (they go into the rice fields in the day and eat the snails that migrate to eat the organic rice), three small stock ponds where they have either cat fish or snake-head fish, and two feet-wide streams coming off the stock ponds that wind back and forth throughout the vegetable plots. The theory is that the fish will be able to live in the smaller stock ponds while being able to travel about the farm eating bugs and vegetable seeds that fall into the streams, and the veggies/fruits planted on the edges of the streams don't need to be watered if they grow so close to the water. There's a thousand fish in there now, who knows if they'll survive when it gets hotter than Hades in those little streams.

I eat lunch every day at the non-Thai school. Today we had chicken curry, an awesome Burmese-style salad with duck eggs, banana flower soup, and some kind of water sprout veggie. Everything but the chicken was from the farm. My students can eat chicken bones, though. Their teeth definitely out-compete my teeth, one of which chipped on a dried kiwi. The last time I stayed at the school we made compost out of rice straw, manure, and freshly chopped water plants. I don't know what these particular plants are, they grow in the water and look similar to lili pads... they call it watergrass. A thick storm rolled in on us as we worked but it didn't matter, though they offered me a baseball hat as it started pouring. We made our pile and played takraw, which is a hybrid of hacky sack and soccer. You juggle a bamboo-woven ball barefoot in a circle until your feet start bleeding. No surprise mine went first. There's something about manual labor and playing takraw in the rain. That may have made my entire trip. After that we ate yet another incredible meal. I'm excited that they are finally serving their normal spice level after lowering it considerably for me at first expecting me not to eat the "Burmese spice". If you want to see their website, email me and I can give you the link, but I can't put it on the blog. Same goes with the pictures!

I have more to talk about since I've been away from the blog for so long. Sorry about that, but if you're still reading this, we're going to get back to regular posts! Peace