Our visit to the the Khong-district.

Hello, We are Wim and Ellen from Holland.

In the first place we planned to go to Laos because when when I saw this coutry on t.v.  I I instantly fell in love with it.

Surfing on the internet for more information I went on the site “Help Laos .nl “an than I leaned how poor this coutry is.

The ideas of this foundation  about development are excactly the the same as ours and so we decided to get in contact and we decided not to be just rich tourists but

do something usefull as wel.

Talk with hand and feet...

As arranged we were picked up by two people of the local part of the foudation, the so called “Khong Development Committee”  The first school was nearby.  Many faces with beautiful brown eyes looked curiously out of the windows. With Dong and Ging in Vientiane we had decided that we would  teach the children some English.  Because  there was no translator we had to improvise so we drew a flower on the blackboard and put the word flower under it. We did the same with the words house, man and woman. The children had to say the words after us a few times. 

It took a while before they understood this and  when they tried  it this caused a lot of laughter. We gave each child a ballpoint and a sheet of paper we brought and than they  had to draw the things we put on the blackboard.  In the meantime  I held up feltpens and let them say the colours after me. ( Red,blue and yellow). Some of the little ones were a bit afraid of us. They worked very hard and concentrated. Some children drew excactly what we drew on the blackboard but others did it their own way and made beautiful works of art.  After  about 45 minutes we got a sign that we had to finish. You should have seen the faces of the kids when we “told” them that they could keep their ballpoint and one feltpen.! They almost couldn’t believe it.

The school was a nice  stone building, built with the help of the foundation and  there was a toilet.

Hundred childeren to teach....

At the second school they put all the children in two classrooms so that in the classroom where I was were about sixty children and Wim had about fourty. So there we stood, without any teaching experience in front of an amount of children teachers in Holland would run away from crying. Fortunately we are used to improvising and we both are not shy so we managed and it even was great to do. That day we visited three schools. The ones that were already finished were very nice but the others were really crap. From the wooden walls many planks were missing and the roofs were bad too. This has one advantage; they don’t have shortage of fresh air!!  One school had no real blackboard but only planks painted black.  You almost couldn’t see what was written on it.

One school was on the riverside and easier to reach by boat. On the way we picked up a teacher with whome I shared my umbrella because it was very hot.

The second day we visited another two schools where we did our little program again. We almost felt experienced now!

A basi-ceremonie for us!

At every school we were treated very kind and Mr. Bounchan and Mr. Kamsai are very kind,  gentle people and it was an hounor and  a pleasure to get aquainted with them.

After we did the last lesson we were taken to a room where we got a basi. I cannot express in English how that felt but it was fantastic. All the teachers were there and a few people from the village. One old lady was (we think) the head of the village.  It gave us the feeling of a blanket of wamth, kindness and tenderness was spread over us and twithin an few moments the tears dropped from our eyes.

It were the best two days of our holiday and we were sad that the English lessons on saturday  were cancelled. During our mission we had back-up from Ging and Dong.

Interested?

I have the intention to go back in January 2012 and than stay for two months. My husband cannot go with me because of his work, so if someone wants to go with me..

Send a mail to : adrie@helplaos.nl