Happy Start to the New Year
January 1, 2012On the Friday before the New Year’s festivities, we visited the remaining three schools to deliver libraries and school supplies. Nothing starts the new year like seeing hundreds of smiling faces from kids receiving their first storybooks for the first time!
We started the morning at Nong Louang, a primary school about a half hour motorbike ride from Paksong. Since Tyson’s visit in May, a new school building was built next to the old schoolhouse from the people of Japan. It was a beautiful building with three new classrooms and a large office/meeting room for the teachers. The classrooms, with freshly painted white walls and big open windows, were furnished with new desks, chairs and chalkboards. We could tell the students and teachers took a lot of pride in their new school. Even though the floors are made of cement, everyone takes off their shoes before entering the classroom to keep it clean.
We stayed a few hours, watching the teachers teach their lesson plans and the students using the notebooks and pens we provided to take notes. In one of the classes, the teacher had students take turns to stand in front of the classroom and read a story to the class. When we first passed the books out, they excitedly flipped through the pages, showing each other the different books they received. There was a lot of laughing, giggling and chattering as I circled the classroom and our translator said to me, “They like the books a lot!” Library project = success!
With a busy day ahead of us, we left Nong Louang to drive an hour to the Nong Pa Noun and Houeychort villages to deliver the rest of the libraries and school supplies. Nong Pa Noun is where liveGLOCAL and Miir installed the first water pump, so we returned to see how the pump was doing, in addition to interviewing the teachers on the students’ progress — so far, so good!
A few days ago, we stopped by the school in the evening when no one was there and saw how much garbage there was littering the brush behind the school where the pump was located. In Laos, it’s common for people to throw garbage any and everywhere. You rarely see a public trash can and there is no “garbage service” like we have in America. Instead, they burn their piles of garbage, which is shocking to us, a group of Americans who come from cities that recycle and compost religiously. The amount of garbage we saw at the school was pretty disgusting so we thought up a simple contest to get the students to clean up their school. We brought dozens of garbage bags and broke the students up into groups of 8, and the team that brought back a full bag first won a coloring book set with crayons. They went absolutely bananas for this and within 15 minutes, they had a clean schoolyard!
For this school, we brought crayons and paper to do a Miir art project with them. Miir offered to feature a student’s art piece on a skin for their water bottles, with a portion of the proceeds going back to liveGLOCAL so we had the students illustrate the answer to the question, “What does clean water means to you?” Since the only subjects they learn in school are math, science and Lao language, this was a fun and creative break for them.
We accomplished a lot this week and we couldn’t have done it without the donations and support from you. Thank you for helping make all of this possible. We closed out 2011 with the spirit and joy we will undoubtedly carry into 2012 — Happy New Year everyone!
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