Tuesday 8 February 2011

Teaching the Novice Monks

This past weekend has possibly been on of the best so far. Earlier on in the year two of the Thailand Volunteers made the unfortunate mistake of going home which meant that some novice monks were left without an English Teacher. One of the past volunteers from a few years ago lives there now and invited us all over to do an English Camp with them. Lets just say that we didn't hesitate to say Yes.

We left Friday evening and got a bus to Bangkok and then a van in the morning to Nakon Sawan where the English Camp was help. Due to the distance, we arrived a couple of hours late and missed the debriefing. We just arrived at the temple and then started teaching straight away. The only problem was that because we were the last to arrive, we were left with teaching stationary which is actually quite hard. We managed to think up some games though and the novice monks did really well. They were very shy but we managed to get them to volunteer to come up to the board to do the tasks. It was weird though at some points as the monks cannot touch women and this includes novice monks but when they wanted picture with us, they just came right up to us and we were all touching shoulders and we were all wondering what we should do. Should we move away or not? Also we cannot pass anything to them directly or let them pass anything to us. We have to put it down for them to pick up but they kept on just putting their books into our hands or taking them out with confused us as well. We did the lesson eight times to the different groups and they all went really well which was good. Near the end, we had a small class which had monks who were lady-boys! We didn't understand how they could be monks but poor families send there children to be novice monks as it means that they get free accommodation and food. So they must make a small exception for lady-boys. They were so much fun as when they had to run to the board they did it so womanly and lightly placed their hand on it instead of running and hitting it. We also played a few games with all of the novice monks together in a big room. When we played 'hand to hand, cheek to cheek', there were these two really small novice monks who were so cute and had the cheekiest grins on their face.




That evening we all went into the main town area to watch the parade for Chinese New Year. It was perfect timing actually as Nakon Sawan had the biggest population of Chinese people in Thailand so its the best place to go. The parade was immense. It went on for ages and included Chinese dancing and costumes and everything. We also went down to the river to watch a show which included a shadow dance, Chinese dancing with the really long sleeves and a dance where the dancer takes away loads of faces. It was an amazing day even though really tiring. 




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