Are these schools?

Time for a wee up-date I feel.

The rainy season is well underway here now. Our office team have been visiting learning centres and yesterday we got soaked through and then very stuck. Sometimes it is OK to be a female as no one expected me to push. I still got very wet and my shoes covered in mud - again.We were visiting a learning centre built of bamboo on top of a big pond that has a fish farm underneath. It was the first bamboo school I had been in as most have been replaced by block and corrugated iron. Even the floor was bamboo and being the heaviest person there I was scared I would go through the floor. Even though I had seen some schools with no kids in them I am now so shocked to see them with kids in them. It is so heart breaking and almost indescribable. They resemble nothing that I call a school. Oh they do have adults and kids and that is where the similarity starts and ends. Even photos don't do them justice. I think the health care for the migrants is also as extreme although there are lots of organisations working with them as well. One big organisation that has many donors and who supply money and support for over 30 learning centres is having a big up-heaval at the moment. If donors pull out it will mean many schools and kids missing out on absolute basics.

When we arrive at learning centres we are made so incredibly welcome. We are usually offered lunch with everyone else. I found these mothers doing the dishes after lunch. An amazing kitchen.

I have been running into several NZers lately. One young woman from Wellington runs an organisation who are supplying exercise books, pencils, pens, rulers etc for all 13000 migrant children for the rest of the year. They use many exercise books here as they have no other resources. The kids get very good at copying off the whiteboard. The noise in the learning centres is amazing as there are no walls between all the different grades. The kids often chant answers back and the rest of the kids can't hear a thing - well I couldn't anyhow. It means in a room 10metres by 60 metres are 150 kids or more aged from KG to grade 7. There isn't much space for these grade 5 kids to take part in activity based learning. You don't often see school bags but these kids have them.

I have also met a lady from Palmy who is volunteering in a senior school. We will catch up soon as she was teaching when I was in her school. There are 2 NZers in her school but the other was not there when I called.

The social life has picked up considerably. I have plans to go cruising in a mini van next weekend to long distances with my work team, eating out takes up most evenings, movies Wednesday nights in someone's house, and coming up soon we are riding our motorbikes about 40 kms away to another area - an invitation from an Aussie who is volunteering there.

It is still warm enough to sleep without a sheet on top although I don't have the fan on anymore.

At work I have found some little projects to have a go at. I am writing a couple of policies for my office to try to prevent confusions as all the volunteers come and go, trying to get a student report book underway and 30,000 printed (extra funded project), and supporting my bosses research into learning centre conditions. Everything takes a very long time as it all needs translating and checked again and again. Documents for the learning centres are in Burmese and English and stuff for the office in Thai, Burmese and English. Some meetings I go to are repeated 3 times as well- English, Thai and Burmese. It is hard to keep focussed at these meetings.

So that is me at the moment.

Asia is certainly different and Maesot very different.

Moving around is amazing

Transport here is a fascination. It can range from the family motor bike carrying the tiniest baby to several adults all at the same time. The truck which we call a ute is loaded so high it is scary to pass by and there are people on top of it or the deck of the ute has a large number of people going somewhere. There are all sorts of the strangest contraptions to transport things and people including tuk tuks, motor bike taxis, motor bikes or push bikes with a deck at the front. And then there is me shuddering along on my motor bike. I have a license now although, to pass, I had to learn THEIR answers by rote not the ones in the road code. They were different. The English translations were a real challenge. I couldn't even imagine what was being asked. So, transport remains a fascination and these are only 3 examples of how to get around. The varieties are limitless.