A day of laughing and loving and learning

Today was a great day.

It started off with an early-morning excursion to the market to find something for breakfast. I was a little confused as to why we even did this, but whatever. I'm confused about why we do half of what we do. 

So without asking questions, I followed my mom into the dirty streets of the city and watched and waited as she picked up some chicken from a vendor, and then we got back in the truck and headed down the road on our usual route to work.

Throughout the rest of the day, Umpaa taught (or at least tried to teach) Meredith and I how to crochet, we taught her and Nute about color combinations to use for jewelry, I taught Nute how to make my special yarn bracelet, Nute taught Yai how to make my special yarn bracelet, Umpaa re-taught me how to crochet,  and Olay taught us how to paint clothes-pins. Neural synapses were exploding all over the place. 

Joe. Every time I ask him for something he asks for money.

Before lunch, we were all gathered around in a circle kind of just sitting in awkwardness, and then Joe threw his arms up and said, “Amen!”and everyone started eating. It was hilarious. 

Also, when Nute and I got to the burning part of our bracelet-making, she handed the bracelet and the lighter over to me. I gave it back to her and said "you," but she scrunched her face and scooted away really fast, saying, "RON!!" (HOT!!). 

Aaand...during clothes-pin painting, I gave up trying to copy Olay's perfect little flowers and just started flicking paint everywhere. Nute was pointing and laughing for like, a minute straight. They were probably secretly thinking of the number of dollars (or baht I guess) down the drain every time I "finished" one. 

These are the things I've learned to find humor in.

Olay painting prettily.

At 4:45, John came to rescue me from listening to lottery numbers being rattled off over the radio. And also to take me to the children's home. I was much better prepared today because I found this awesome website called Dave's ESL Cafe that had a bunch of ideas for games to play to teach English. 

To start off, I taught the kids direction words like forward, backward, up, down, left, right, etc. Then I blindfolded one of them at a time and the rest of the kids had to use the words they'd learned to direct the blindfolded student to my water-bottle. I had to constantly remind them to use English, not Thai, but they caught on fast and got a kick of leading each other in the wrong direction.

Next I drew a body on the board and labeled all the parts, and then we sat in a circle and I told the kids to draw a body part (head, eyes, feet, etc.) and then pass it to the right. The whole time I was wondering what they were laughing at, but by the end I was passed back a stack of drawings of women with gnarly armpit hair and toothless smiles. It was probably a bad idea to have them write their names next to them, but whatev. 

After that...lesson, I taught them about parts of speech. I started out with nouns and verbs and prepositions. It's hard teaching English after I recently took Elang 325, which basically blew apart all word categories I'd ever learned. I'm teaching everything I was just un-taught. Oh well. We have to start somewhere. Just don't tell my professor.

The kids' English is so limited that the most exciting part of the night (for me) was when I put a pen on the chair and pointed to it and they all chanted "Pen on chair." It was also pretty great when I said, "One chair, two...." and Sang (or Jason--the oldest, and the best at English) responded, "chairS." Yes!!

They were really soaking it in, and even though I'm pretty sure they only understood 25% of what I was teaching, I'm still so proud of them!

In the beginning I joked that they would all be fluent English-speakers by the time I was done with them, but I see now that that's impossible. There is SO MUCH to teach, it's overwhelming.

We ended the night singing, "Five Little Ducks," which they've basically mastered (but they have a hard time saying "waddling"), and then we all held hands and prayed and they sang me a cute Thai hymn and then I made them take a picture with me and we said goodbye and I left. 

Me and the kidlets. The weather does fabulous things for my appearance. 

Like I said, it was a good day.

PS: Sorry if these posts are long and boring for you. But they're mostly for me to remember what I'm doing and feeling every day, so actually, not sorry.