This n. that

   Bumper sticker:  "If you can read this you was to close."   Road sign "City Limits Produce Speed."
   Thai school calendar:   The current school term will end mid-March and the next term will begin mid-May.  That term will end in October followed by a 20 day vacation with the next term beginning in November.
   At the beginning of the school year (May) each teacher will make a home visit on every student in her grade. After lunch the teachers bag up left over food and send it home with poor students.  After lunch students stack the chairs and sweep the floor.  Then they use the broom with which they swept the floor to sweep the table.  Today the 3rd grade took a day-long,standardized test supervised by two teachers from another school.  Two teachers from our school were at another school supervising a test, therefore, two of our grades had no teacher today.
   Thai manners and customs:meals  At a meal the first person present begins eating without waiting for others.  When a person is finished he/she just walks away. There is no custom of thanking for the food. There are no serving utensils,  Using a fork in the left hand and a table spoon in the right the eater ladles food on to his/her plate with the spoon with which he/she is eating.  Entree dishes are not passed, anyone wanting something just stretches for it.  Diners will often take a choice piece of food, e.g., fat pork, and put on another person's plate.  Rice is served at every meal unless the entree is a noodle dish. Breakfast meals are the same food as other meals.  This morning my breakfast was fried pork on rice.  Thai seldom us chop sticks but use them enough so they are very adept.  Foreigners often ask for chop sticks for food that Thais would eat with fork and spoon.  Thais are more likely to eat sitting cross legged on the floor than at a table.  Meal times are very flexible...Thai people are more likely to eat when they are hungry than at designated time.  Food stands are everywhere in Thailand and Thai are as likely to buy food there (take out) as they are to cook at home.  There is little concern about keeping food hot until eaten.  They love extremely spicy food and eat much sea food.
   Customs at home:  People come and go without saying "hello" or "goodbye".  If a person is hungry he/she finds food and eats.  At bedtime people just disappear without saying good night.  When one is asked "you shower?"  It means "Please take your shower now."

4th grade working on the floor

6ht grade doing dishes

Gai's & Mai's tuk tuk.

Chinese New Year

   A couple of years ago a student from my alma mater, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, called to thank me for a gift.  Her English was good but not American so I engaged her in conversation.  She told me that she was sophomore from Ghana.  So I asked her what she thought of South Dakota winters.  She replied "There are no words for it!"
   That's how I was feeling about describing the Chinese New Year's celebration in Ayutthaya but I've been challenged to try so here goes.  Main street is shut down for about 8 blocks, except of course for the motor bikes that weave through the pedestrians.  There are two performing stages with constant performances, Chinese dancing, singing, acrobatics, magic shows, etc.  Then there are endless booths demonstrating, selling. giving massages, serving food...you name it...selling clothes, toys, jewelry, household goods, cars, trucks, motor bikes...about anything you can imagine.
   The streets are filled people elbow to elbow or closer...it's nice to be tall.  Every food imaginable is for sale cooked on site with  food court tables and chairs.  Red is the predominant color, clothing, lanterns, stage decorations. lights, dance troops weaving through the crowd as dragons.
   Take the state fair, a huge block party, market and the world's largest church bazaar and stir them in a pot....I hope you get the idea.

Unfinished school...3yrs?  something about counting the cost before you begin to build.  I'm happy, I like the funky, old wood school.

I like the lotus flower water towers.

After the 2011 flood this elevated walkway (see red roof) was built between to chapels of the temple.  There's been no flood since and this construction is perhaps why there wasn't money to finish the new school.  No one supervises how the abbot spends money.

My school seen from the temple.

3rd grade.

3rd grade.

Pictures

Kabeem, grade 3, modeling the new (to me) plaid shirt

Grade 5, my plaid shirt tells you "I got the memo"

Meenha, grade 6, showing a backpack for Noble students

A variety of plaids.

Skeleton House

    In 2011 a devastating  flood struck much of central Thailand including Ayuttayha.  The area around my house was under as much as ten feet of water.  This was then a new housing development.  Many of the houses under construction were  abandoned and several stand unfinished now.  One of those is about 20 feet from my front door.
   I call it the skeleton house because the pillars and second floor are poured and metal rafters are in place.  It had stood that way since 2011 until Sunday when work began on it.  First a bamboo scaffold was built around the house.  Then the metal rafters were repainted, though nothing was done about rust.  Nothing has happened since Sunday so I assume the workers are doing it on their day off.
    I had wondered if it would ever be finished and if the original construction could be salvaged.  My family is happy about it because the owners are friends.  Apparently these are not the original owners but are related to people in the house next to ours.

Skeleton house

Making bamboo scaffold

Painting, he ran all over the rafters in his bare feet

No OSHA rules in Thailand

Living is not easy!

     Met was excited to show her pay for her week's sewing.  I almost cried,  She's been sewing athletic shorts.  Her pay for the week?  about $9.00.  Think about her when you buy clothes made in Thailand...or from other 2nd or 3rd world countries.
   Poe, the young married daughter, who divides her time between here and her husbands house, is a university graduate working in accounting/bookkeeping.  Currently she is working 72 hours a week...12 hour days 6 days a week for two weeks and then 12 hour nights for two weeks.   Regular time, i.e., the first 48 hours per week, she gets paid 37 baht per hr. (32 baht = $1.00).  For her overtime work she makes 54 baht an hour.
   But that's not all.  She has to commute an hour each way and each way she pays 100 baht for a bus ticket. She has no sick leave, no paid vacations and no pension.

My school

School is on the temple grounds

Eating lunch

Students raking before school

Pictures

Thai krumcake

Thai dancing before the buffalo show

Buffalo walking down steps

These machines have replace buffaloes in rice paddies

Riding the buffalo cart

Traditional Thai house

Laughing On The Road

   If you ever want to have fun take a road trip with a group of Thais!  It was non-stop laughter in the van coming and going  I enjoyed it even if I understood less than 2% of it.  There were 11 of us on the trip that included the principal, his wife and the former principal, whom I also knew.
   We went about a 2 hour drive to Saphanburi to visit an historic market.  If you've ever been to the Minneapolis Farmer's Market it's a slight taste of an Asian market.  The market sort of indoors, the walks un-roofed, is celebrating it's 100th anniversary this year. Off the beaten tourist track I saw no other westerners.  Buy, eat, look...Thais seem to eat all the time and that was certainly true on our trip..
   Then it was on to the water buffalo park.  I have been fascinated by water buffalo ever since seeing them pulling farm implements through the rice paddies when I was in Asia in the '60s, compliments of Uncle Sam.  When the teachers suggested we see the buffalo I quickly agreed.
    Water buffalo grow to be huge beasts and are usually placid.  It's not unusual to see an Asian childr lying on the back of one.  In Vietnam there are staged fights which I've seen on TV.  Two huge bulls, weighing a ton or more, come galloping at full speed  and hit head on.  
   The show was preceded by children doing traditional Thai dance.  Plowing, with a wooden plow, harrowing, pulling a wooden sled and grinding rice were all demonstrated.  Then they showed the buffalo doing their tricks, lifting left foot right foot, kneeling, smiling, standing in a line, climbing steps, etc.  Several were white, albino, and many had massive horns. Riding on them was largely sitting but fulfilled a long held dream of mine.  We also got a ride in a buffalo cart.  This stop was the highlight for me.
   A temple you ask?  Certainly no trip in SE Asia is complete with out visiting a temple/  The Muslim teacher and I skipped the temple.  We just looked around.
   The trip was a 'thank you' to me for teaching.  I'm not the only volunteer that comes but I'm the only one who comes back.  It was a great bonding experience.

With teachers at entrance to market...one next to me on left is Muslim.

By a Banyan tree,

Rider on an albino buffalo. (All steers, by the way.)

Giddyap buffalo.

In front of the buffalo show.

A plow more antique than mine.

Pictures

Met, wife/mother, where I live, sews.  This is a partially completed pile of sewing.

Students playing before school.

A rainy morning so the opening ceremony was moved to the hall.  They first chant a Buddhist liturgy and then a Muslim one.

4th grader, Bell, in a traditional dress for a school publicity photo.

Grade six.

Nutrition? Program

    Every morning a truck delivers a special cargo to every school in Thailand.  Ostensibly a nutrition program it delivers a bun, individually wrapped in plastic, for every student provided by the Thai government  The bun is at best wonder bread quality with raisins backed in some and sausages in others.
   Mid-morning two or three students go through all the classrooms handing out the buns.  Not only are those students missing their class, the distribution is a significant disruption of the class in which they are distributing.
   Bread is not big in Thailand.  Go to a super market and their will be aisles filled with a huge variety of rice.  Bread will occupy a small shelf or tow.
   Who made the decision to do this?  Why bread?  Why individually wrapped buns?  Why white bread?  Who has the concession?  Why distribute in class when the buns aren't eaten until lunch?

Flowers by the house

Skeleton house, abandoned after the big flood in 2011, behind a banana tree

Spirit house for the spirits disturbed when the 'people' house was built

War Hysteria

"President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on this date in 1942. The order authorized the removal of any or all people from a military area, as deemed necessary by the military. Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor several weeks earlier, and residents of the West Coast felt especially vulnerable. There was a great outcry to do something about the tens of thousands of resident aliens from Germany, Italy, and especially Japan who lived on the West Coast. Roosevelt told the Secretary of War to execute the order as reasonably as possible, but apart from those vague instructions, he didn't take much active interest in how the order was carried out. As a result, the military deemed most of the West Coast to be a "military area," and over the course of the next several months, some 120,000 people - more than half of them American citizens - were sent to internment camps. Roosevelt rescinded the order in December 1944 and began the six-month process of releasing the detainees and shutting down the camps. In 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that EO 9066 was a "grave injustice" that had resulted from "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In 1988, President Reagan offered survivors an apology and $20,000 each."

From the Daily Almanac

Thailand is Different

   Having spent much time in Thailand there are still things that surprise me,  Every morning at 8:00 a.m., (Thai time means something around 8 o'clock) all the students line up by classes in the school yard.  This morning I noticed that most of the teachers were absent.  When I went to teach my first class, 3rd grade today, there was no teacher present in the room and the same was true when I next went to the 4th grade.
   The mystery was solved when I went downstairs to the lunch hall.  The cook had a doctor's appointment so the teachers did the cooking.  In the meantime their classes were left unattended by any adult except when I was teaching.

(Some of these pictures are posted for Noble Academy students with whom I do 'I spy'.

My breakfast, steamed vegetables on rice

3yr olds line up

4yr olds line up

4th graders Lila and Jam

My omelet for lunch, on rice of course

Misc. Pics

Sophia, my former student now in high school.

Mr Al with his friend

Girls raking leaves before school

Student teachers

6th grade girls playing Hackysack

Cups and tooth brushes on the floor

Student washing dishes

My lunch, chicken noodle soup