Laa's Wedding

A wedding for one of my English students. Eat strange, delicious foods. Drink beerlao. Dance the lam vong lao. Repeat.

What really strikes me Laos weddings is how simple and much fun they are. The reception was held in the dirt road between Laa's house and her neighbor. A keyboard, an electric guitar, a microphone and a bunch of speakers. That's right, if people aren't willing to play instruments and sing there would be no music. I can only imagine trying this in the US, it would be dead silence... My favorite was a little old lady that didn't bother with dance partners and simply rocked out to every song.

The culinary treat for me this night was buffalo skin straight from the fire. You take a strip of buffalo skin and toss it in the fire. It resembles a rib from a cow except beneath the dry outer layer of skin you can feel squishy inside. After you remember that you tossed a strip in the fire you fish it out with a stick and scrape off the charred outside with a knife. A chewy, buffalo skin, aptly named Jerky Buffalao.

birthday parties

Not sure why every Buddhist monk I am friends with has a birthday in January... Photos from the monk birthday parties in January!

Paper Airplane Contest

We held the first-ever paper airplane contest in Luang Prabang! A poster was taped to the door and a 1 meter paper airplane was hung from the ceiling to advertise. About 20 kids showed up of which there was one girl, a couple of university students, and a handful of novice monks. Several kids had never made a paper airplane before!

The first paper airplane was named "Laos Airlines" and was a simple airplane with which some of the kids were familiar. The idea was to get over shyness and relax into a new learning environment. The first experiment was put a paper clip on the back or the front of the airplane and see what happens. The next experiment was to cut flaps into wings and tail of the plane and see what happens. Planes were flying every direction! I had typed up several airplane instruction sheets with names like Sua-Tiger to encourage different designs.

Next were the contests, the categories to be judged were: distance, speed, flight accuracy, landing accuracy, and the completely open-ended creativity category. The kids really got into building a plane to win the contests. There were prizes at stake! After the ensuing madness, a prize of two notebooks and two pens were awarded to each winner.

Getting kids past their shyness with foreigners and a new style of learning was easy. Language was the real barrier for me but I had my mad scientist assistant, Soulisuck, translate all the difficult concepts to Laos language. Getting kids to think on their own and be creative will be the ongoing challenge.

Carol, Alan, Linda, and Derin were the judges for the contests. Thanks for helping out, I hope you had as much fun as I did!

The Naughty Novice

A story by Tricia, a friend and fellow teacher in Luang Prabang.

This is a little story about a little lesson in life. The moral of the story is all is not as it seems. This is what happened.

I had been teaching English for a couple of weeks to novices in the Monk School in Luang Prabang, Laos. I had already realized that novice monks come in all shapes, sizes and personalities just the same as any class of adolescent boys. There are the quiet, reserved types, the enthusiastic learners, and the ones who couldn’t care less about learning English or were just too tired to care. It was a particularly challenging class at the time. There were seemingly quite a few novices in this class who had a very relaxed attitude about learning English and a few who were getting on each others’ nerves – or that’s how it seemed to me.

In the middle of this English lesson there appeared at the door a young Lao tour guide with his Western tourists at hand who stopped momentarily to observe the Australian teacher struggling with controlling this class of novice monks. Thankfully they didn’t stay long and didn’t witness the next scene. I began to smell smoke and as it was useless to ask where it was coming from as no-one would have understood me I looked for the evidence. A young novice had lit a piece of paper and had placed it in the open compartment of one of the old wooden desks. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this young novice had taken the “find something else to do while the teacher is talking” attitude just a little too far. But I knew better than to take the approach I would have taken if this classroom was back in Australia and this teenage boy was in ordinary clothes rather than the dazzling orange of his robes. So I tried as best I could to mask my first reaction of reproaching him in the usual Teacher way. I thought that I would hand this breach of discipline over to the young Monk who was helping me at the time with translation. His response was to laugh. I hope to take this approach back with me to my classroom in Australia – it would probably prove to often be the best reaction. However, not being that advanced in not taking things personally, I shot the novice a look of Teacher disapproval and a warning tutt-tutt.

Later that evening I came across the young tourist guide who had shown his tourists the Monk School that day. He commented on how hard it must be to teach the novices and so with a righteous attitude I told him the story of the novice who had done the naughty deed of almost setting fire to one of the desks. Again I received a response which was contrary to what I expected. He explained to me that he used to do this himself when he was at school. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear this confession as I had already tagged this cheeky young tourist guide as a bit of a larrikin. But the next part of the explanation did come as a bit of a surprise. The reason for lighting the paper was to smoke out the mosquitoes that breed in the dark places in these old wooden desks and not at all to cause trouble to the teacher. I’m sorry to that novice for thinking the worst and will try to remember in the future that all is not as it seems - particularly when you are in a foreign country teaching English to young novice Buddhist monks.

Justein

At the library everyone is plugged into photography and photoshop and they create a poster to introduce themselves. Just because I was a teacher didn't mean that I was exempt. So I asked my sister, the whiz photographer and photoshopper, to create a poster for me.

This is what she made...

I fell out of my chair laughing, but the real experiment was to see what the kids would think. University level physics students do not recognize the middle photo. Every day I get questions about it, "Is that you Grandfather?" Amazing that only one person has recognized the middle photo as a famous person, and even then could not say who it was or why he was famous.

Is there a need for science teachers in Laos?