Helping the High Schoolers

This past Saturday, Brad and I had the pleasure of helping out a few of the high school students with a project they were working on. For their project, the students had to make a video of themselves showing us the traditional Thai culture while practicing speaking English.

We started off our adventure with the locals, by hopping in the back of a pickup truck. This is how large groups get around, and between myself, Brad, the five students completing the project, and the mom and dad of one of the students, who offered to drive us around, there was not enough room for us all inside the truck.

Our first stop was at the Wat Sra Kham Pang Yai. This temple does not look like a traditional Thai temple, but rather it is designed to look like a cave, as you can see in the picture below.

The students showed us around both here and at our next stop, the Wat Pa Sri Mongkol Rattanaram. It was so nice to have our own personal tour guides, so we didn't have to struggle to read information like our time at Wat Phra That Reuang Rong.

Th Wat Pa Sri Mongkol Rattanaram is another temple, but here there are also ruins from an old temple that used to be in the area that is now Cambodia. The temple got moved to its current location when Cambodia broke away from Thailand, and now the ruins of this temple lie in the middle of new temple buildings.

Here's a picture of all of us climbing around on the ruins.

After we finished looking around, the students interviewed us for their project. They spoke with confidence while asking us questions; and during the entirety of the trip, I was surprised at how well we were able to communicate. It makes me almost wish I taught older kids, but my kindergarteners are too sweet to trade for anything.

Then after we were done exploring, we enjoyed some lunch together at a Thai restaurant. The students ordered an array of Thai dishes that we passed around and all shared. Some were a little too spicy for me, but the majority of them were delicious.

As I've said in a previous post, it's cheaper to eat out than to buy groceries and cook for yourself. But even though going out is cheaper, it is more of a hassle. When you do go out, you usually can't read the menu so you either are brave and simply point to something and are surprised when it comes, or you order the same things over and over again because those dishes are the only food words you know. Now I'm not one for surprises, so the second option is what we typically do. We usually eat Suki (a kind of noodle soup), pork and basil, fried rice, curry, or rice soup because those are the only food words in our limited Thai vocabulary. But thanks to our lunch with the students, we now know the names of some new dishes.

We had such a wonderful day with the students, and it was so nice to get to see more of the area around Sisaket. We enjoyed it so much, that we told them that if they ever need help again we would love to volunteer!