Singburi Week 1

A little background for those I didn't get a chance to talk to before I left- I managed a month of unpaid leave and decided to spend the in Thailand. The first half of the trip I'm volunteering in a rural area north of Bangkok (via the IVS) and the other half I'll be traveling around, hitting an elephant sanctuary, maybe some islands, rock climbing, national parks, whatever sounds good at the time. For the photo version of this blog, here's my pics.

Now the update- I met up with the volunteer group on Monday morning in Sing Buri, had an intro day that day, then Tues, Wed, and Thurs working in a school (mostly on tiling a classroom floor). The volunteer group of 9 consists of 4 people from France, 2 from (French speaking) Belgium, and 1 each from Toronto, Germany, and Portland (me). French tends to be the default language and it's fun to listen to that and pick up a little bit of that and Thai too. There are a couple other volunteer houses a few miles away, and we run into them from time to time. There's a bar by one of the volunteer houses that looks like a lemonade stand, but they serve Thai beer and whiskey, we've had a couple debaucherous nights there already.

The work in the school is a nice mix of manual labor and playing with the kids. The kids are super friendly (actually almost everyone is in Thailand) and though they have no language in common w/ any of the volunteers, we find ways to communicate using sign language, soccer players' names, and gibberish. Next week we'll be teaching them English, let me know if you know of games or other tools that are good for teaching when the students and teachers don't speak the same language. I've got a couple simple riddles in mind, juggling, and duck-duck-goose of course.
We've got this weekend off and I'm either going to head to a beach or a national park. I want to see some monkeys.