Life in Phana

Study Centre in Phana: Teaching and learning English

The Rin-Homhuan Mahanil Study Centre in Phana has been taking up so much of my time this year that I have not blogged since Pensri and I took a Christmas break to Laos. Much of the activity at the Study Centre is concerned with teaching and learning English so I am going to start a mini-series of posts with some pictures and a few comments on that.

Back in January we welcomed a couple who were touring Thailand but they took a month out to do some teaching for us. They went to a local village school for two mornings a week and to the tetsaban-run nursery one morning a week. I don’t have any pictures of them at the  school but teachers and pupils there agreed that they had done a great job in motivating the kids. Here is Sarah at the nursery in Phana:

 

The Study Centre was visited by the director of the local ‘Continuous Learning Centre’ which provides various courses for adults. As a result of the visit, the staff of the CLC came to our Study Centre for classes in English. They were doing this after finishing work, so attendance after the first few weeks dwindled and finally other things took priority for this group of students. But in the next two pictures you can see Sarah working with these Thai teachers. (The clock had stopped – it really was after work, about 4.30 pm.)

  

Another interesting experiment was proposed by a village primary school about 6 kms from Phana. Instead of us sending teachers into their school, they sent classes to us twice a week for six weeks. This worked very well, especially because the children were very excited to be able to get out of their classroom, out of their school and out of their village for a whole morning at a time. Teachers and parents brought children to us and collected them again, though their timing was not always very reliable.

Here is a volunteer called Bekah with some of the youngest children:

 

Maria and Liz and Pensri (out in the lane next to the centre):

  

Bingo is a popular activity and very good as a way to practise their listening skills as well as number recognition; and if they call Bingo! they have to read back their winning numbers:

Some children, who mostly live nearby to the centre, have organised a class of their own and currently they come for an hour and a half twice a week to learn and practise some English and to play games. UNO is their favourite! Here are some of these children:

So this aspect of the Study Centre has been very successful. Sometimes we have been a little disappointed that more people have not taken advantage of the opportunity to practise their English, but we have to remember that people have busy lives with lots of family and community commitments that make regular attendance for classes difficult. So we should be very pleased that we have attracted as many ‘customers’ as we have. And we are. And we hope to attract more in the future.

Previous posts about the Study Centre can be found

                        HERE     and      HERE           

Christmas in Lao PDR

However much I enjoy life in Phana, it is good to get away sometimes and for me Lao PDR is the best place to get away  to. This year I had to leave Thailand at the end of my allotted 90 days by 22 December so we decided to stay away over the Christmas period. There is only so much of piped jingle bells that anyone can take.

I prefer round trips if at all possible and so this time we decided to drive up to Thakek and then do the 'Khammouane loop' that so many tourists on motorbikes are encouraged by the guidebooks to experience. We did see a couple on the route but there were also several people we came across who were doing it by public transport -- more gruelling, possibly, but almost certainly safer.

Referring to guidebooks again, I read this loop described as possibly the highlight of a trip to Laos. Without doubt the trip is full of highlights. The scenery is pretty much one continuous highlight, and we also were lucky enough to stay at two resort / guest houses that were particularly welcoming.

The first was on our first day out of Thakek. We headed for a small town called Mahaxai which my guiddebook described as a 'delightful little town' with several guesthouses. I think they were thinking of somewhere else, or perhaps some tourists had written in recommending it as a joke! Mahaxai can never have been delightful and right now it is being 'redeveloped', meaning that it is nothing more or less than a red-dust dust bowl. So we pushed on ... and fortunately saw this sign just a couple of kms further along the road (route 12):

  

The restaurant and our bungalow:

  

Other bungalows and the view of the resort from outside:

  

We stayed two nights here. The resort is owned by a friendly English-speaking, Russian-trained engineer at the Nam Theun 2 power station who said he had built much of the resort himself and put in the water and electricity supply.

We drove north along route 1e, a laterite road that until very recently was full of potholes but has now been upgraded and is very easy and pleasant to drive along. It is metalled as far as the Nam Theun 2 Power Station seen here:

  

Some people find the huge flooded area caused by the Nam Theun dam depressing and the dead trees spooky. Of course, villages were destroyed by the flooding and the villagers re-located but their new villages offer them better facilities in terms of schools, electricity, easier access to medical treatment and so on. At a police checkpoint just across the dam, the policeman asked us if we could take an old man home who had been up to the dam for some free medical treatment, and we learnt a lot from him in the 30 minutes or so he rode with us.

  

There is a small stretch of about 5 kms where road works are continuing and we had to wait a short while before we could get past:

  

The road was so much better than we had expected that we pushed on past windy and dusty Lak Sao the last town on route 8 towards the Vietnam border. We turned west and drove on to Kham Khoun where we found a wonderful resort / guest house with the help of our guide book, which proved completely reliable in this instance. We stayed here, at the Sainamhai Resort, this one owned and designed by an English-speaking Cuban-trained architect who is currently running the Nam Heun Power Station and preparing for his retirement in a few years time.

  

  

 

After 3 nights at Sainamhai Resort we returned to Thakek. We had taken several sightseeing detours on our way round the loop and I will write about them and show more photos in my next post – coming soon.

I just met a girl ...

I just met a girl …

A beautiful friendship? Just the pictures (taken this morning) and the captions will tell this romantic tale.

I hope you will click on this link to read my new post:

www.thaimonkeyforest.com

Most of my life in Phana just now is spent in the forest or being busy about some monkey business or other. So if you haven't done so already, please take a look over there.