The English Program at my university is leaving tomorrow at 5:30 AM for a four day trip to a national forest in Saraburi for our annual English Camp. It will be sad to leave the baby and Nam for so long, but it should be fun...

Last week a few of us teachers were asked to visit some classes being taught on a volunteer basis by our Business English major students out in Kalasin. We went out without much info and assumed these were classes being taught at a school. As it turned out, one of our student's family had created an ad hoc classroom outside their house and was hosting free lessons for two weeks since schools are mostly on holiday during October. Children from their village as well as neighboring villages attended, with younger kids coming in the morning and older ones in the afternoon, perhaps 30 kids per session.

The classes were being taught by a few of our students who stayed at the house for the duration of the project.

We went and basically had a lot of fun thinking up activities on the spot... I sweat a lot as it was a really hot day, so I can honestly say that I contributed a lot of salt to my polo shirt.

Our student's house/farm has a shrimp pond out back, so our reward for lunch was huge platters of steamed prawns, raw prawns with garlic, and epic tom yum goong with shrimp the size of mini-lobsters in it.

We also helped out with the afternoon class and took a quick trip to a popular "beach" up the road just a couple kilos, at the Lampao Dam reservoir.

All in all it was a great day, and the dedication of our students really impressed us. When asked why they were doing it, they said they didn't want to just waste their holidays away. Well done!