Akha Hill Tribe School

Friday 3 March 2011

The next morning after that crazy travel day Dylan and I headed to the sister  guest house of the Akha River house, the Akha Hill House. The Akha houses are owned and run by people of the Akha tribe of northern Thailand. Originally, Dylan and I were planning on teaching at the village school for two weeks, however when we contacted the director of the hill house he had told us the children will be on vacation by the time we arrive (so a bit of a bummer, but we were still excited to stay at the hill house). After the long truck ride through winding mountains, vast jungle trails, and flourishing oolong tea plantations, we arrived at the Hill House. Bamboo huts lined the boundaries of the compound with a central meeting/dining area where visitors mingled and shared travel stories. This is where we met Shelley on our very first day,  an Australian mom just taking a couple weeks to relax. She told us about the school and Melvin, a young swedish guy who had been teaching at the school for about a month. I was instantly excited that we may still have a chance to teach at the school after all - and best part was that Shelly was planning on stopping by the school the next morning to drop off some things she had collected for the children.

The next morning we hitched a ride with Shelley. We arrived as the kids were lined up for what looked like morning prayer and exercise. After meeting/greeting the teachers they seemed thrilled to have new teaching volunteers! Right away they assigned us three classes to teach! We ended up actually teaching 4 that day with help from Melvin in the afternoon who arrived during the enormous pot luck lunch that the teachers enjoy every day (and each day a student is assigned to do the dishes from the meal ha ha). The most difficult class was definitely the primary class - those crazy kids. Games were the key - games with alot of movement and crazy shouting patterns. So much fun. And for the rest of our time at the hill house, if we ever saw any of the children from our English lessons, we were called out to, "teacher, teacher!" followed by some random english sentence and a giggle.