Another month passes at the speed of light, and eek! suddenly there’s just five and a bit weeks left here and not five months as I swear there was last week. Slowly but surely - as I think happens when you become pretty much settled in a place – I’ve stopped scribbling in my diary and stopped getting stupidly excited about updating this diary. I can’t really explain all of life here very well, a lot of it comes down to a feeling, or some kind of continuous feeling that runs through the other more day-to-day feelings.

So yes, sitting here looking back, it all seems like a one of those dream things. Surely it was just yesterday I showed up, attracted the attention of a Chiang Mai traffic cop and got my Burmese friend and driver – met not 5 minutes earlier at the airport - fined a month’s salary? (Incidentally he’s now my boss so I guess his month without food didn’t anger him too much.)

Anyway, that story from yesteryear reminds me, has anyone seen October and November? Heady days indeed.

I’m left wondering if the two me’s are different at all; my thoughts tell me I’m probably not the best judge of that sat here. Maybe in another chair...

I do remember when I was young and unhappy (bless) always dreaming of going away to do something earnest and coming back a changed person. Naïve, yup – but I think if there is any bitty of change there it’s tricky to see when there’s nothing about to compare ‘now me’ to. Please therefore send me: one chicken nugget, one ‘over the ear’ Italian hairdresser’s haircut, one bicycle, one spot-free complexion, one table-tennis bat, six football kits, a shed-load of lego, one stupid eating disorder and one love of all things alcopop.

Anyhow, on we go to life this last month – and what an awesome month; I think, for me, the best yet. Some details:

As Larry Days

Life in the camp, for me at least, has been great. With lesson changes of one thing or another I’ve had way more time to spend with the kids... chatting, joke-fighting, game-playing, movie-watching, eating, walking, visiting, everything. I seem fully relaxed and at home here – I can be silly, teachery, organisedy, sporty, sweaty, yappy, sleepy, larger-than-lifey or more knackardy than deathy, and that’s fine. I’ve slept a week inside the giant cave, embarrassingly been the star attraction at the Yaung Ni Oo football pitch as I kept goal for Yaung Ni Oo’s team (I was peeing my pants about this – there were maybe two hundred kids watching, and if I made a mistake, well... Final score 0-0. Took three days to recover, more for the scrapes on my knees, hips and feet (don’t try playing on a rock surface with just sandals on at home kids, especially if you’re in goal.) People are still coming up to me and pretending to dive onto the floor – they weren’t used to the kamikaze diving-on-rocks goalkeeping technique of the Hammond.

Perhaps topping even this in the memorably wonderful stakes was the afternoon spent high in the rafters of a new ‘bordersau’ (dormitory), wedged within a line of fellow workers (all students), binding and weaving the roof of their new home together. Just like that one scene in ‘Witness’: epic.

Moving On

The biggest change in the teaching stakes was undoubtedly me starting to give teacher training over at Yaung Ni Oo as part of the National Health and Education Committee’s three-month Certificate in Primary Education course taking place during the summer. Before I started: shit scared (me? Training teachers? On the back of a months course?). As I went along: sweaty (body parts lesson), angry (why don’t the trainers cease the yapping at the back of the class?), loving it (producing successful lessons where you run through and practice maybe 15 activities is, when your imagination gets going, a reassuring and confidence-boosting thing), conducting it (i.e. the class to an abbreviated rendition of ‘I can sing a rainbow’ with associated comically-timed actions) and just love love loving it more – so long as the hard work has been done beforehand and I’m on-the-button-prepared. Now I’m done: very happy to have experienced something different and even more challenging. Worst thing about it, the entire 36-strong class calling me Mr Bean because of front of class antics.

So that was my experience, but that of the teachers was infinitely more important. Most had travelled by foot, for up to ten days, to get to the border from inside Burma – and as always they had done so at considerable risk. Their enthusiasm, camaraderie, high spirits and hard-work over an intensive eight-hours-a-day-plus course was a sight to behold, their working together and support of each other a real positive in what can commonly be a very private, closed-to-peers occupation. The teachers will return to their villages in the hill regions of Burma and, through their own learning on this course, give kids a better chance to do the same. I hope, in some way, that my three week contribution might show how this teaching and learning thing can, with a little lateral thinking, be fun and ‘educational’ at the same time.

I Hate Snakes

A line from possibly the finest trilogy to grace Yaung Ni Oo’s TV-cinema (and the snakes got a warm welcome too.) Yes, Indiana Jones - sent out by my mum and a complete childhood favourite - went down like a riot. Some films aren’t popular, some are quite popular (e.g. bugsy malone – don’t think they got the kid thing until the end) and some are barnstormers. This was a barnstorming barnstormer. The place was not only filled with kids but a whopping hoard of adults too. Seeing looks of utter disbelief, tension and terror in kids faces (followed by massive sighs of relief and cheering) made the carrot-requiring night trek back to the canteen well worth the sweat. Nice one, Indiana.

Pho Htaung Say Boat

It means something like, Pho Htaung’s got a bad mind, and its what most kids shout at me these days – to my feigned displeasure and cartoon responses. I’m realizing how far just a little bit of language can take you if you are expressive with it – with kids as my teachers you can certainly be that and have a load of fun learning.

Hart Beat

Beth’s arrival with crayons and stationery aplenty gave birth to a seed of creativity nestling within so many of the students. The first drawing wall rapidly fell down due to extreme wind and a collapsing canteen (sorry Beth), but the desire was born then and there, and since the introduction of an artwork file (the kids each get one file wallet each for all their work), there’s been a cottage industry of masterpiece production going on during the day’s hottest hours.

The young guys in particular love a good scribble.

Mum’s games compendium has also been a stormer, the old school office now confirmed as Regional Centre for the Study of Inquisitive, Competitive Fun: puzzles, cards, ludo, snakes and ladders (a Nicola creation- see below) and the legendary they-all-love-it Lego. There’s one company I’m writing to when I get back for sure.

Two for the Price of None

A couple of weeks back I said goodbye to Nicola – a fellow Brit and South America/South East Asia voyager with three weeks to kill at the end of her mammoth adventure: what better way to end it than Mae La Oon?! She did brill in the camp, working hard to get things as right as can be, teaching two classes, giving private one-on-one lessons and being extraordinarily creative in her time here – giving me (the supposedly trained English teacher) lots of ideas and tackling a short play (performed in front of an audience) with her older class, to their enthusiastic delight and demands for more. While some have had the opportunity to do drama before, certainly nothing of the sort had been seen in an English lesson before: great.
Nicola also seemed to settle into camp life well – its tricky because it does take time to adjust, and at the end she was pretty much there on the adjustment and kid-befriending front, but then had to leave for flights home. Still, top job Nicola, well done.

Nicola in createmode(tm) - this time it's Snakes and Ladders. Tomorrow, Twister.

Yay for the Yei!

Considering Nicola was only to be around for a few weeks, it might seem strange that our first four or so days back in the camp were filled with zippo teaching. The reason – and quite a reason it be – is Sokran, the Water Festival. It’s ninety-six hours within the slopes of Mae La Oon was hilarious, wondrous and cooling if not a little sodden. The basic idea: pouring water down people’s necks to wash away the sins of the year past, in celebration of the New Year to come. The application: hoards of kids (especially teenage males it seemed) running around camp with little buckets pouring water over suspecting and unsuspecting passers-by (males going for the girls every time), even visiting resigned home-dwellers to pour the unrepentant liquid over hair, clothes, home and sundry. At Yaung Ni Oo the kids to special delight in mutual soakings; as stick-out-like-bruised-thumb foreigners there was no way we were escaping the throng. Resigned and relaxed you had to be about being wet through all day. Relaxed about dancing with groups of drunk men lining the dusty roads. Relaxed when, having just dried off and skillfully avoided what you thought was the entire content of boarding students armed with water, the other half of the kid-brigade rushes you from behind armed with half the Adaman sea. On a different note (luuuurgh, a deeper one), the festival-as-spectacle-and-historical-event also provided Oo Ni Kay and Htwe Yee with rich interview pickings in their efforts to write their first ever essay, about the highs and lows and beginnings of water festival life. The girls did good. ‘Yei’ means what in English?

Happy New Year!

Canada Bound

The other biggest change on this visit was an urgent message received from Beth. I was to ‘choose’ one of my two four-hours-a-day students to go to Canada for a two-year Scholarship, while the other (her best friend) stayed behind for a year before the (uncertain) possibility of herself heading off to a different country next year. On hearing the news a ‘this is important, you’ve got to be responsible, choose sensibly on the back of reasoned arguments and judgement, and be as fair and as clear to the girls as you can’ kind of voice struck up and I was off... interviewing them a second time for the required transcripts, writing personal statements, meeting in private with all manner of folks who might have an opinion on who should go and why, setting up numerous schemes for the one who doesn’t get chosen to get her English teeth into next year, and preparing to deliver the good and bad news. I chose Oo Ni Kay to go, Htwe Yee to stay – for a complex set of reasons to do with confidence, social skills, learning style and age. Never before have I directly had people’s futures in my hands like that and, with the girls both outstanding people, I found making the decision almost unbearable. Made it I did though, and I’m happy with my choice – Oo Nie Kie (there are two spellings, one her own and one given her by the UNHCR translator at refugee registration) will do great and is great. For more info on this please click on ‘Tour of Britain’ followed by 'Sponsor', where the beginnings of another fundraising venture is beginning to swing into gear...

Okay, once again I’ve realised I’m going on forever. Here’s a lightning-quick tour of a few other bits and pieces:

- A huge rainstorm one night in the camp – and my crossing of a road, in the dark, which was covered by thundering, gushing water up to waist height. Experiencing the slipperyness and precariousness, the mosquitoes, and the changing landscape which followed just this one storm gives an inkling what life must be like in the wet season with guaranteed downpours daily.

- A huge fire in Section 6. Take a look at the pic. It was a marvel this didn’t end in some Great Fire-esque tragedy. Houses are dry from long summers, made of extra-combustible materials, and there just isn’t any water if you live half way up the mountains or above. Lucky then that this house was right by a stream and backed onto a road (natural fire break) not row after row of huts. Four houses went up in maybe ten minutes – the disasterous scene played out before our eyes, yet luckily no-one injured, two whole sections mobilised to safeguard their own – and they did it brilliantly.

- Two trips to Chiang Mai and Mae Sot. Nothing to write home about. (er, haven’t I just done exactly that?). One trip to Burma – yes, Burma – will update at the next opportunity.

- Headed (as always) back to the camp tomorrow morning for my farewell. The rainy season is already upon us in radical spurts and it’s becoming increasingly unpredictable and difficult to get either in or out. As a foreigner I can’t to the river-travelling thing so it’s to Chiang Mai I am next bound for a month or so. Something in me is very, very sad to leave the camp – especially because it feels as if its before my time, but something – an honest something – tells me that I’ll be back here in the near future.

Until then, Mae La Oon.