Halloween

On Saturday night, Steph, Julia and I had a Halloween costume party! In class, I told my students a little about Halloween, trick or treating, and costumes. Friday and Saturday, we spent lots of time baking cookies, bars and brownies! We baked many more than necessary, but we didn't know how many students to prepare for, and now we can bring some to our other teachers tomorrow.

Steph, Julia and I dressed as Power Puff Girls. Not many of our students could guess who we were.... oh well. It was fun getting dressed up. Some other teachers were pirates and Little Orphan Annie.

 We had some outfits and costumes for our students to wear. Here is Pirate Linda fighting a cowgirl. They really enjoyed trying the costumes!

 Julia, Steph and I were Power Puff Girls.

We had paper plates for them to make masks out of.

 Apple bobbing

Here's some of my students with their finished masks.

Here I am with an apple, a banana, and a cowgirl.

The party was lots of fun! Hopefully this can be the beginning of some relationships that can grow deeper and closer through the year or even years!

Home

This is my home for the next year. I live with Julia and Steph. We are staying at our leaders' house because they are back in the States for the year. They raised four children in Laos, so their house is nice and big and furnished. 

We live at the end of a little dirt road. During rainy season the holes filled with sand can be pretty treacherous! 

This is our beautiful yard! We have lots of trees; even two mango trees I think, which will be wonderful to pick in March and April!

 This is our living room. We spend a bit of time sitting in here doing lesson plans at night. It's especially nice now, in cool season, with the windows open and a fan on.

This is the dining room. Another great thing about this house is our mae baan (maid) Joi. She comes two days a week to sweep, mop, do dishes and laundry, dust, cook (if we so desire), clean the bathrooms.... She really does all of the housework for us so we don't have to! She is helpful in so many ways - calling our water guy to deliver more drinking water, and the gas guy to bring us a new gas tank (?) for our stove. She has brought our sinhs to be dry cleaned.... It's great having her here!!

 Here's our kitchen! It's been so nice to be able to do some cooking (since our first 6 weeks in the guest house, we ate out every dinner and supper out). Fresh veggies are super cheap here too, which is awesome! I have not been able to purchase any meat from the market yet and I do not plan on purchasing any while I'm here. Walking past the freshly slaughtered chicken, fish, and pork smells bad enough, I do not want to be any closer to it! And veggies taste way better than meat anyway! Since our leaders had lived here for many years previously, we have an abundant supply of pots, pans, dishes, Tupperware.... which is also great!

This is a little storage area. My motorbike sleeps in here at night. The racks are where Joi dries our clothes. The washing machine is in the big reddish/brownish thing at the back. The first person who leaves in the morning has quite a few locks to unlock. The first one is the door to the kitchen. This storage area is surrounded by fencing, which is padlocked. Then the gate in front of our house needs to be un-pad-locked and relocked. Not quite like Sheldon where nothing ever really got locked. But at least we know we're safe!

And this is my bedroom! We each have our own bedroom (and a spare if anyone wants to come visit!) You can also see my amour (closet thing) and a little bookshelf that was here before me.

And here is the bathroom that I share with Julia. (Steph has her own.) We have 4 bathrooms in the house too! Joi also cleans these for us so we don't have to! :)

This is my house! We also have a ping pong table outside and a nice veranda/porch upstairs off of the office. It is beautiful up there in the mornings!

This weekend is the Boat Racing Festival. It has some stuff to do with Buddhists and such, but I don't understand it very well. Last night we went down the the river and saw everything they were selling and tried some yummy food! Festivals are similar all over the world- yummy food and people selling stuff. The boat races are on Sunday. There's like 50 people in each boat and two boats race at a time. We'll go back tonight and tomorrow to check it out again.

Teaching is still going good! :) I love my students so much! And am slowly learning their names! I still need to improve my lesson planning....

Dong Dok

I have finished my first week of teaching, and it was great! Monday I started class at 8:00. When I walked into my classroom, there were only three students sitting in their desks. Which was probably actually less frightening and intimidating than walking into a room of 40 students. Over the next hour, students kept trickling in, and I ended class at 9:30 with about 20 students present. 

This is our office. There are only three of us in here, so it's pretty spacious. We also like to spend time in the Lao's office; we eat lunch with them many days. We're hoping some Lao teachers will add their desks to the room... but we'll see. The table in the middle is a nice place to sit and chat over coffee and tea. 

These are four of my students. (I do not know their names yet.) We were advised to take pictures of each student and put on a note card with their name, age, phone number, province.... so we can study their names and have some info about them.

This is our beautiful campus! The building in the background has many classrooms in it. Campus has so many trees and so much green - it's awesome!  My classroom is about a 10-15 minute walk from my office, depending if I walk at Lao or American speed. Unfortunately, I usually enter my classroom with sweat pouring off my face and body. :( I'll need to keep reminding myself to walk slower, so I'm not passing people left and right, and so that I'm slightly less sweaty when I start teaching. But we're coming up to cool season thankfully! :)

I have mostly been figuring out little things for my class. (I have one class that meets for 1 1/2 hours 4 days a week.) It's a little difficult because of the varied levels of my students. Some of my students could have a discussion about politics in America and Laos, and others mmm.... couldn't. Some of my students haven't been coming to every class either, which also makes it difficult to learn something when they weren't there the day before so they have no clue what I'm talking about. But I really like my students so far! I'll need to look at my little cards to learn their names quickly! Some examples: Latthikone, Phonesavanh, and Sorxayaphoum. 

I have also been taking a sawng tao to school, which is sorta like a bus that is in the back of a pickup. It is a little more than an hour commute each way. First, I ride my bike to Talat Sao (Morning Market) which is a little tricky in a silk sinh. Then I park my bike and walk a bit to the sawng tao place. Then ride in the sawng tao for 30-40 minutes depending how many people we stop to pick up. But people often talk to me in the back of the sawng tao. If they speak in Lao, the conversation usually ends pretty quickly :( , but if they speak in English, sometimes we can talk for the whole half hour and it's so fun! 

But I passed my motorbike test on Thursday!! :) :) :) So, hopefully on Monday or Tuesday I can buy my motorbike and then it will only take 30 minutes to get to Dong Dok. Dong Dok is the village/area of the city where the National University of Laos is located, so it is just called Dong Dok.

Teaching is going great! I still have lots of improvement to make on my lesson planing, but hopefully the students haven't noticed too much yet! And I'm excited to teach them more and get to know them more!

Teaching

I will be able to start teaching on Monday!! :) And I am sooo excited!! 

We thought we were going to start teaching last week Monday (October 4), but the schedule wasn't figured out and such... so now we will start this week! I will be in the Faculty (Department) of Education, which means I will be teaching the future English teachers of Laos. Two other teachers from my organization are also in this faculty. We have a nice office that the university just fixed up for us! And the other Lao teachers in our faculty are great!

On Wednesday we ate lunch with them. We thought they ate at 11:30 or so, so Steph and I went to a market and bought some grilled chicken, papaya salad and sticky rice to contribute to the meal. We were just sitting around their office chatting and then they decided it was time to eat, around 11:30. It seemed like there wasn't much food and people weren't eating much, but we don't know how it usually works. When we finished eating, we were still just sitting and chatting in their office to get to know them and such, and then 4 other teachers came in with bags of food! They pulled out the plates and spoons again and everybody was ready to eat!

Steph and I had just decided that we should leave soon and do some work, so when we were walking past the table to exit the room, one of the teachers asked why we were leaving without eating! We said we were full from the little meal we ate earlier and we would eat with them next time! Each person we passed stopped and tried to make us stay and eat with them! We finally got out after politely declining 4 times, but they were sooo sweet!

We're also pretty sure they only ate at 11:30 because we were there and ready with our food because everyone else seemed to know to come at 12:30ish... but again, how sweet of them to eat two meals so Steph and I wouldn't feel stupid. So, we still have some figuring out to do of when they eat, where, what.... But it will be lots of fun to get to know them over the year! :)

On Friday we also had a little birthday party for Linda, the other teacher in our faculty. She is turning 50! Steph and I made a chocolate cake for the party and the Lao teachers loved it!!


So far, I only have one class. Which sounds really slack! But I teach the class 2 hours a day four days a week, which equals 8 hours. We can only have 12 hours (says our organization) so I will be adding another class when they finish figuring out the schedule. I'm so happy that I will get to see my students four days a week! :)

I think I'm just really ready to start teaching because we have been in transition for so long! And I want to meet my students! Monday is the first day! Hopefully it will go well, since I still feel like I don't really know how to teach English that well.... :)

Haircut

I got my first ever hair cut from someone who is not my Aunt Kristi. But it went pretty well! Heather, a teammate, tole me about Daeng who just cut her hair earlier this week. Thursday morning, Julia and I biked over to Daeng's house/salon. There was an old man weaving inside who told us that they were closed. We were a little confused because we understood "We are closed" more from his body language and lack of welcoming than from the words coming out of his mouth, and because we weren't even quite sure we were at the right place. We left and called Heather and she told us to try again in the afternoon. 

We returned in the afternoon and were warmly welcomed. Daeng tried to ask me a few questions, but I came prepared with a picture of what I wanted it to look like and Touy, my tutor, wrote down some phrases for me to say: one was trying to explain layering, and the other Don't cut it too short please! She started carefully cutting my hair, while it was dry, before washing it. She was kind enough to allow me to practice my few Lao phrases on her, and patient enough to respond slowly and even teach me some new words. After cutting it, and layering a bit (although probably not as much as I would have liked) she washed it. She put shampoo in my hair three times and scrubbed my ears, forehead and neck too. I don't know if my ears and neck were super dirty or if everyone gets scrubbed down that vigorously. Then she trimmed a few stray hairs and blow dried it to finish. Although it wasn't quite as nice and relaxing as usual when I go to my aunt, it was still good! And if she didn't do quite what I wanted, it isn't a huge deal since I put my hair up almost every day anyway. And Kristi was also nice enough to give me an extra scissors that she had, so if I need to fix a few hairs, I have the equipment to do so! 

Daeng cutting my hair

Friday night we went to a wedding. It was for a couple that we met at the Lao church. They thought it would be a good cultural experience to attend a Lao wedding. We kept the envelope that the invitation came in, because when you get to the wedding, there is a big decorated box to return the envelope with some money in it. They don't give presents, but the couple knows exactly how much money each person gave because their names are on the envelope.

The couple sat on the floor for most of the service. They were this far apart almost the whole time and hardly touched each other.

The couple and the four pastors of the church

Getting ready to throw her bouquet!

Julia, Touy (our tutor) and I

A better picture of our sinhs

They had a reception and food at the church after the ceremony. Touy introduced us to two of her (English speaking) friends. They were really nice and fun and it was so nice to be able to chat easily in English.