Becky's Big Adventure

I am currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand. This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here do not represent those of the Peace Corps or the United States government.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

My First English Camp

This past weekend I went to my first English Camp at my friend Wesley's school, and it was so much fun... the point of an English Camp is to play games and sing songs and get kids interested and excited to learn english... which is very hard since most of the kids in the schools never use english in their daily lives and most of them dont get help with school work at home... It was two and a half days and the Volunteers there were wesley, arnold, brian and me, the kids were 11-12 years old and the little girls liked to ask me if i have a boyfriend (and then after PCV guys arrived, telling me that they thought they were cute and asking if they had girlfriends) and they laughed when i told them i dont have a boyfriend and i dont want one because i dont have time
I also went to my first thai funeral with pee-lan this past week because i happened to go to her house for dinner and she had to go to the wat (temple) after dinner so she invited me, funerals here are very different, they go on for several days more that funerals in america, the "service" consists of 4 monks chanting for about half an hour, and another thing is that in addition to flowers on the coffin, thais also like to put blinky christmas lights there as well, as new cultural experiences go, this one was one of the most interesting and different,
my birthday is this week and the girls at my office dont want me to miss home on that day, so they have decided to throw me a party... there will be chocolate cake, lots of food and i am sure a kareoke machine
I have PST2 coming up in a week and we are going to southern thailand to the beach... life is so hard sometimes...
Things i have in the works right now(even if just in my brain)
- HIV/AIDS Camp for thai high school kids
- world map project (conjoined with a local history project with the kids at the high school)
- and TYT (Thai Youth Theatre) with an English Club at a school in my Amphur

things that i have realized...
- you can be married off without actually meeting a guy as long as the mother likes you enough (one of the teachers at the English kept telling me that she has a son who is 25 and she kept calling me her daughter-in-law)
- it is impossible to get half an hour to myself after getting home in the afternoon, due to the 5- 11 year old girls who stake out my house after they get home from school so they can come over to talk to me before i even get to put my bag down (although they are so cute and sweet, i dont mind all that much)
- that i am HORRIBLE at the humdinger cards in the boardgame Cranium
- it is amazing how much people can care about you even though you cant really speak the same language (ie- the thai people at my site)
- that after a bad, frustrating day, one phone conversation in english can make everything better
and
- my nayoke has no rythm, we started aerobics at my office and for some reason the 45ish man decided to join in with the women, (just try to imaging the mayor of your town jumping up and down like, and with, a bunch of girls) this memory is in my top 3 funniest things i have seen at site since my arrival

i love you and miss you
becky

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