Thailand Adventures and more: The end of a chapter....

The moment I got back to Thailand I got a call from Ann, my Thai assistant at school, saying that the director had to go to our house to move stuff because of the flood waters. What a lovely surprise to come home to! It turned out that our house didn’t have any water in it, luckily. Others, however, were not so lucky.
Here are some pictures of the flooding that happened in Singburi.
This is at my bank. You had to crawl on a chair over a cement wall to get to the ATM!

This next picture is of the road that I usually ride to school on! Obviously I had to find another route!

This next picture shows a restaurant (the right of the picture), that I would frequently go to....but was closed for a few weeks because of the water.

This was outside one of our classrooms to protect it in case the flood waters came to the school.

Unlike the local children, I decided NOT to swim in the flood waters!

Another surprise when I got back to Singburi, was that we had 2 new teachers! Pete and Laura were from the UK and were very enjoyable people. I was sad that they had just come, now that my time was coming to an end. Their presence helped make a very tough decision, a little bit easier. The decision I was faced with, was whether I stay until the end of my contract, the end of December, or leave at the end of November and then go and do volunteering at an orphanage in December for a couple weeks. If Pete and Laura wouldn’t have been there, I would have felt I was leaving the school out to dry and leaving them without the proper staff. I was able to talk to these two about what I was faced with and found support from them. I told them that I have been passionate about volunteer work for a long time and from the beginning of my time at Anuban School, I thought that I would be helping teach kids who needed it, not working for a special English program that parents had to pay a lot of money for their kids to be in. I was not looking forward to sharing the news with my school advisors, who had been bugging me daily about extending my contract. I felt terrible about breaking my contract, but I had worked long and hard for the school and put up with a lot.

When I broke the news to James and Pat, I was met with looks of sadness and plea after plea to get me to stay (forever!). Pat told me that I was the best for them and she didn’t want anyone else because they wouldn’t be as good. I kept saying that they had Pete and Laura and they will be good. She told me not to compare myself to anyone else because there was no comparison. Pat said that she never had to worry about me because she knows that I am always doing a really good job. One of their suggestions to get me to stay was to have my family move out here for a couple months to keep me company! I told them that’s not really an option! I won’t get into all the other things they said to me to get me to stay, but what they were trying to accomplish was for me to sign a contract to come back, before I even left. It was nice to hear them say all those nice things about me, but I hadn’t heard those the whole rest of the time I had worked at the school.

When I told Pat that I felt that our students listening skills were getting worse and that I felt they just don’t listen most of the time….but that for Thai teachers they always behave, she responded by telling me that it’s because the kids know that because we are foreigners we won’t hit them! I finally had Ann tell the kids that I was leaving. There was a great uproar in the class and shouting. I guess the one question the students had was about when I was coming back! Over the next couple days students kept coming up to me and saying, “Come back sure?” Also over my last couple days I got many gifts and presents from students. Unfortunately my last two days were nothing as I had anticipated. When Pat found out that I told my students I was leaving, she was very upset with me. I asked her if I wasn’t supposed to tell my students that I was leaving and just take off. She didn’t even respond. I was then basically told that I was to have no farewell or say goodbye to the kids. I was very upset by all this and my whole last day of school, instead of being a happy time and being able to take pictures with and say goodbye to my students, I taught like every other day, but with no smile on my face. After almost a year of extremely hard work and doing so much for the school, this is how I was to be treated. I really wish I wouldn’t have left with a sour taste in my mouth….but so goes life I guess. I will still have many, many great memories of all the great times I had with my students and the progress I made with them. And that was the end of another chapter of my life.

Before I left Singburi to head to Vietnam to volunteer, I got to participate in the 2^nd biggest Thai festival, Loy Krathong, which is a festival of lights to give thanks and pay respect to the spirits of the water and the nourishment water provides. One of my students’ parents invited me along to a celebration.