I've been helping with the Advanced English class, for which we only have a few students so we only do one class per night whereas those doing Intermediate level are teaching two classes per night. I've been very hands-on with the teaching though, because the team member I'm teaching with (Heidi) is German, so she's happy for me as the native English speaker to do a lot of the stuff focusing on pronunciation, and take the larger speaking parts when we do readings. The material we use is American, so it contains a lot of words and phrases that Heidi and I would never use, so we often tell the class what the Australian and/or British equivalents as well. I realised how much Aussie English I was using the other night when we were doing a role-play exercise in pairs, pretending to make enquiries about accommodation, and Goy answered my, "I'm sorry, it doesn't have a pool", with, "Oh, not to worry". I'm pretty sure that phrase isn't found anywhere in their textbook!
The CBS class is run by Heidi every Wednesday, and continues pretty much year-round whereas the English programs are generally only run every second month or so. The idea is that if students want to continue practising their English in between the English programs, they're invited to attend CBS, which has a lot of similar elements to the English classes but is based, as the name suggests, on chronological Bible stories and has a more relaxed, social feel because it's held in Heidi's lounge room. Heidi has been telling me that it's a bit challenging to know which stories and what details to include in the series, to give a faithful telling of the message of the Bible without being too confronting to the students' Thai Buddhist worldview early on. A couple of the students who have been attending became Christians a few months ago, so God is obviously working through this group, despite the potential pitfalls.
Tomorrow night we'll be having a social gathering for the students. Initially the plan was to have a party last Saturday night and this Saturday night (this is the usual routine during the English programs), but the king's sister died recently and the king issued a general request that people refrain from festivities for 15 days out of respect for her, so the first party was cancelled and tomorrow's event has been redefined as a more subdued, educational evening to tell the students about Australia and teach them to cook Anzac biscuits. These social gatherings are a great opportunity to chat to students about things a bit more significant than how to order food in a restaurant in English.
The English classes have taken up quite a bit of our time and energy, so the only really touristy thing I've done since my last epistle is a white water rafting trip with Rhonda and Talia McNaught. It was great fun - I've been wanting to go white water rafting for YEARS! Our guide was very cheeky, and kept doing things like pretending to push us out of the raft with his paddle, ramming us nose-first into big rocks, and turning us upstream and yelling, "Forward! Faster! Go, go, go!!". The tour also included a trip to a long-neck Karen "village", which I wasn't keen on because I suspected that the practice of putting rings around girls' necks to stretch them is perpetuated partly because it brings the tourists in. I was right to be sceptical - the "village" turned out to be a dusty field with the remains of several fires in the middle, surrounded by souvenir stalls that were attended by women from the "long-neck tribe", the "big-ear tribe", and the "black-teeth tribe". It was horrible - I felt like we were treating them like circus freaks, and it was obvious that the rings
cause them a fair bit of discomfort (you can see in the picture how they've tucked cloths inside the rings to stop chafing). It wouldn't have been so bad if it had been a real, functioning village where we were meeting them on their own turf and seeing how they live - but this was just an awful place, purely set up for tourists, and the women did not look happy. I was reluctant at first to take any photos but in the end I asked them if it was OK for me to take a few, because I wanted to show you the nasty side of what tourism can do in a country like Thailand.I only have another 8 days in Chiang Mai, which is hard to believe! On Sunday week, we'll be departing for the long drive down to Pattaya for the Pioneers conference.
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