Volunteer Stories | Tina
I am in my fourth week at Luang Prabang and have slipped into a comfortable routine – but something astonishing happens just about every day.
My day typically begins with a cycle ride to one of Luang Prabang’s thirty-something temples. Wat Nong is small, pretty, and set in a lush tropical garden. I teach a small group of novices and one monk English conversation. We hold our classes in the drum house, a small pagoda-style building in the temple compound that houses the ceremonial drum, as big as an oil drum. The drum house is approached by steps with red and gold dragons at each side. The monks have brought in a table, two benches and a couple of plastic chairs to make a classroom safe from monsoon rains. On the second day they brought me a jug of filtered water and a glass – very welcome in the heat. The next day the table was covered with what looked like a rumpled bed-sheet. “Table cloth” announced one novice, “His idea.” This morning I was brought a mug of hot water and a sachet of mixed instant coffee, powdered milk and sugar – not my drink of choice, but very kindly meant. The monks are so grateful for my efforts, but I learn as much from them as they do from me, about Lao culture, Laos’s different ethno linguistic groups and about temple life.
Later I go to Santiphab Library, where a wide variety of students come to read, complete homework, play games, or seek help from the English-speaking volunteers. Sometimes they have a knotty homework problem. Sometimes they just want to chat and improve their spoken English. You never know whether you will be playing Connect Four, discussing the perils of MSG or helping with pronunciation for a student eager to read Harry Potter in the original. On one memorable day, I helped a maths scholar with terminology for algebra, as he was helping some Korean exchange students at his university and English was the required medium. As I am a maths teacher at home this was a pleasure indeed.
In some respects, the students seem just like students anywhere with their trendy haircuts and cellphones. That is until they tell you about their home villages, where their parents are often subsistence farmers, and the whole family forages for food in the forests. They have a fund of knowledge on the capture and preparation of birds, rodents and fish. They recognize edible fruit and vegetables from the forest, know their seasons, and also what not to eat. I feel ashamed of all my useless knowledge.
In the evenings I teach a free English class attended by students, waiters, anyone who wants to come. Many have learned English vocabulary and grammar from Lao teachers, and now need to apply it and perfect pronunciation and conversation skills, also tune in to different accents. These sessions are enormous fun. Teaching here is generally quite traditional, chalk and talk, bare classrooms, sparse resources. At home I am used to Power Point, data projectors, YouTube. Here if I pass around some pictures cut from an in-flight magazine to illustrate a point the students strain to look. Games are always enjoyed. It took a little persuasion to get my class to work in teams but now they love it and are competitive in a good-natured way. I walk around the class and they are all on task, a feat I rarely achieve at home with a class of 20 teenagers. Here I have as many as 33.
Luang Prabang itself is characterised by what is not here as well as what is: no Starbucks, no litter, no MacDonalds, no road rage (well, I have never seen any), no CCTV, no casual aggression (here you lose face of you lose your temper). No hassle from people trying to sell you things, which happens in some parts of south-east Asia. There are many contrasts. The Lao girls, demure in their long Lao skirts, perched side-saddle on the backs of motorbikes, texting on their phones; a schoolboy on his way home, a cartoon mouse on his back-pack, swinging the traditional sticky-rice basket that had held his lunch. Tiny women labour on construction sites in long skirts and flip-flops. One older lady in a sarong scrambled on to the top of a two-metre high wood pile, I presume to fetch wood for her cooking fire. The next house had an enormous satellite dish. Another volunteer teaching in a village school was surprised when the regular teacher walked through the classroom wrapped in a towel. No-one else was surprised. Groups of men are often seen squatting on a wall by the river chatting and smoking, looking so comfortable in a pose I don’t think I could achieve since I was eight. One was using a I-pad. I saw a girl in this position looking very comfortable despite wearing stilettos with her Lao skirt.
Living in the Guest House we have family life going on all around with a big extended family coming and going. One of the grand-children had a birthday and all the guests staying here were invited to share the feast. The baby of the family has learned to walk during my stay. Somphone, the owner is always mending something: a Singer sewing machine, a motorbike, a screen door, his clothes, a calculator.Nothing is wasted.
Continuing this on my return, the whole experience has had a lasting effect. On my last days, I felt a sadness to leave these people I had got to know. I could never walk around Luang Prabang without a student screeching to a halt on a bicycle beside me, eager for a chat, and then often an exercise book would be produced with some query on grammar or meaning. I never walked home from class alone, someone would always fall into step, keen to have that last ten minutes extra practice. These memories stay with me now I am back in a culture where education is so taken for granted. On my last lesson with the monks they presented me with prayer strings they had made, and taken into the temple while they chanted. Their little note thanked me for my work and said: “May Buddha bless you.”
