Life on the border

In our last post we wrote about a selection of things from our experience volunteering as teachers for Karen refugees. For this post, we thought we’d share with you what our daily life is like at the college.

On the unlucky days, we are awoken well before dawn at 5:00am, when the monastery starts blasting its early morning sermon/music programme from loudspeakers in the village. If the Buddha isn’t feeling talkative, we are instead woken by roosters sometime after 6:00am. The students have an hour of morning study and first light breaks around 6:30am. We review our lessons and get ready for the day.

Breakfast is served at 7:00am, which is typically fried rice and coffee. The college has a great cook who makes our food and manages the students’ cooking duty.

The students have grown up without much news, advertising or media, so they haven’t had the same exposure to the world that we grew up with. We have started playing the BBC Burmese Broadcast each morning, as many of the students understand Burmese as well as Karen. The BBC have been broadcasting shortwave into Burma for years, penetrating the censorship of the Myanmar government. The government once even instructed its citizens not to believe the “sky-full of lies” coming from sources like the BBC! It’s great when the students come and tell us what they have heard in the news.

At 8:00am it’s time for the daily flag raising. The Karen flag and national anthem are banned in Thailand, so the students sing the Thai national anthem and raise the Thai flag. They also sing “We will overcome” in lieu of their own anthem. After some quick notices the students leave for their first class.

The students are in four groups: two first year classes and two second year classes. At home, a typical student would be pretty inert at eight in the morning, but it’s a great time for class here as it’s nice and cool. The students have six hours of class a day across five different subjects: English (for two hours a day), community health, computers, Thai and maths. There are Karen teachers for every subject but English and, like us, they live on campus.

This is Nirvana, the son of one of the Karen teachers

We usually teach for around five hours a day. The curriculum is very open, and the college wants the students to learn more than just English grammar, so we have been able to run a range of cool lessons.

Does anyone remember doing the BP Technology Challenge at primary school? It’s a competition where teams have to build structures from newspaper, string and tape in a short time. We ran the bridge challenge for the students, in which they competed to build the longest and tallest bridge that could hold a weight. It’s a great activity for teamwork and problem-solving,

With so little time left at the college for the 2nd years, we’ve been focussing on teaching them how they can continue learning after graduation. We’ve been teaching things like goal setting, reflective thinking and research. A few graduates will have the internet, but most are heading back to their rural villages in Karen State where there are few resources. Some of the graduates will be the most educated people in their villages, and will therefore need to be resourceful if they are to help educate their neighbours.

There is an hour’s break at midday for lunch. We are spoiled with the meals here. There is always rice and soup along with a great variety of vegetables and curries. Classes start again at 1:00pm. By now it’s roasting hot in the sun, and not much better in the classrooms. Reading and thinking start becoming harder in the heat, for both teachers and students!

At 3:00pm class ends and work time starts. The students have a variety of duties such as cooking, cleaning, gardening, carrying water, digging, building, hauling wood and cutting bamboo. We use this time to take a walk through the village or else do some more lesson planning.

On most days the students get “play time” at 4:00pm. Last weekend we held the first ever game of ultimate frisbee here. Considering many of the students were new to frisbee, it went surprisingly well! Volleyball and caneball are the most popular sports, but with the recent additions of basketball hoops and a ping pong table, there are some new options for the students too.

Most of the students eat early, at 5:00pm. Interestingly, the Karen don’t seem to have a strong communal eating culture. Some students simply crouch down outside, eat their food quickly and then head off to do something else.

Fish paste. Yep, it’s what it sounds like, and along with rice it is the staple food for the Karen. It smells like a market stall selling old fish, and doesn’t taste much better! But they enjoy it, and it has been the cheap protein source keeping the war ravaged Karen people alive.

For us, early evening is the perfect “shower” time, when it’s still hot enough to shower (i.e. pour buckets of cold water over yourself), but not so hot that you’re sweating afterwards. The water reservoirs in the bathrooms appear to be the watering holes for the local wildlife. We’ve shared the bathroom with mice, spiders, cats, lots of strange insects and even a few bats! After showers we have dinner at 6:00pm, just as the sun starts going down.

Evening study time for the students starts at 7:00pm. We’ve also been running an extra night class for some of the students who are strongest at writing. It’s been really fun teaching a smaller class with such a motivated group of students. Their writing has come a long way in just a couple of weeks. Study time lasts for two hours.

Since our arrival there’s been a big push to increase the number of books available to the students. The college now has a good range of fiction and non-fiction, in accessible English as well as Karen, Burmese and Thai. New bookshelves have been built for the study halls, and it’s been really exciting to see so many students become enthusiastic about reading.

The bell rings at 9:00pm marking the end of study and of the day. The students gradually make their way to their dorms. We head to the office for some more time planning lessons. On a good day, we finish before 11:00pm, lock up the office and head to bed.

The danger of writing a post in this way is that it might give the impression that the days are uniform. But every day is a bit different, and we’re getting used to having a more fluid schedule than we would have back home (to put it mildly!) Some of the disruptions are really important though. Last Sunday, news arrived that the students would be able to go across the river to Burma and get a Burmese identity card. Like we mentioned in our last post, many refugees in Thailand have no proof of citizenship in any country. So the next day half of the school emptied out to take up the opportunity. That night, we headed across the river to deliver some food to the students and see a new part of Karen State. As we walked down to the awaiting boat, we spotted a working elephant being taken for a bath!

Once we were across the river, we somehow ended up hanging out in a small hut that was tastefully decorated with an AK-47 and a belt of grenades. We chatted to a friendly young Karen soldier who welcomed us and talked about how happy he was to see foreigners in Karen State. He also talked about how his job was to shoot the Burmese if they came over the hill! We are now pretty much acclimatised to being in a perpetual state of confusion. Why were we in this hut, where were all the students and who are all these people with guns? Oh well, may as well enjoy the pleasant company and beautiful scenery!

Our Karen soldier friend

Weekends at the college are relatively quiet. Many of the students go back to Mae La Refugee Camp to spend time with their families, while others spend time sleeping and attending church (around a third of the students are Christian). We’re never short of something to do however (especially with all the lesson planning we need to do for the following week). There are plenty of sports and games going on in the mornings and evenings, while we often put on a film with English subtitles during the hot afternoons. A few times we’ve had singing in the evenings, while other times we’ve gone for walks in the surrounding area.

A school bus, Karen style

It actually doesn’t feel like we get many weekends at the college, because every fortnight we have to journey down to Mae Sot and across the border to Burma for a “visa run”. The visa run is a farcical bureaucratic process where we have to walk across the bridge to Burma, get an immigration stamp, then walk back into Thailand in order to extend our stay by two weeks.

Welcome to Myanmar… Goodbye from Myanmar!

So there’s a taste of daily life at the college. The time has gone amazingly fast, with just a couple of weeks left until graduation. Right now we are taking a short break to explore Chiang Mai, a popular tourist city in the north of Thailand. Once we leave the college we’ll be leaving Thailand and heading on to explore Myanmar. It will be sad to have to say goodbye to so many people, and strange to be back on the road again without seeing the same faces every day.

Comments from WordPress

• Sujai 2013-02-24T16:06:53Z

  Craig and Sal - this is SUCH an amazing post. You guys are brilliant (as are the Karen students, from the sound of it :-)). Keep writing, and try to avoid being shot!

• Robbie Lane 2013-02-25T08:47:34Z

  I enjoyed reading your post - interesting with the political, cultural and religious history of the Karen among the many Hill tribes in that area. It will be good to hear more of what is happening now - particularly with the opening up of Burma. Travel safe and if you find a Burmese fridge magnet - I have a fridge that would love a new decoration!!! Yours in harmony - Robbie :o)

• Bridget S 2013-02-27T01:48:09Z

  I just realised that evil facebook has stopped informing me when you post these so I went hunting. What an awesome experience you are having! It sounds really rewarding. I am surprised it took you more than a day to crack out the ultimate frisbee though ;)

  Miss you guys!

• Debbie Lever 2013-03-05T13:19:36Z

  Hi Guys, What an amazing experience. How incredible, so many things I take for granted in every day life. Ie. reading the newspaper! Hope the rest of your adventures are just as amazing! xox

• Craig and Sal 2013-03-16T06:41:09Z

  Hi everyone,

  Thanks heaps for your comments - it’s nice to know you’re enjoying our posts. We feel really lucky to have had these experiences. Now we’ve changed back from teachers into travellers and will be heading into Burma on Tuesday.

  Cheers, Craig and Sal

Written by Craig Drayton and Sally Robertson