At CEAL (Center for Education, Art and Literature), the students and I met a Cambodian man who is the Peace Partnerships Program Officer for the Amercian Friends Service Committee. The AFSC is based in Philadelphia and is part of the Quaker organization.
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I arrived at the Sittwe airport where I was met by the two grinning faces of the students whom I had taught in Yangon during October. This put me at immediate ease after trying to talk to the 11 teachers in Thandwe who looked mostly bored and at best a little confused by me.
For my last evening in Kyuak Phyu we had something of a feast with the business man and his family at the hotel in which we stayed.
It took 17 hours. We left Yangon at 5:30 pm when the traffic was heavy and the light was dimming. The traffic was not the only heavy thing as the head monk of the monastery where I have been teaching cranked up the radio to what sounded a lot like Burmese metal music!
I got up at 5 am and met the daughter of the village vet who is also on the village development committee. We are already partnered with the village and they have two NEH laptops and a tablet for use in the village.
It seems that part of becoming an emerging democracy from a regime that does not really want to give up its power is a lot of sanctions on voting. One such sanction is something on biblical proportions; you must be in your home town or village to be eligible to vote.
Today my students had 30 minutes in which to teach a topic of their choice. One student is currently doing his final year university exams, which are a week long in Myanmar. He came to the practical class on his one day of rest from his exams. I am pleased by this commitment, however, the exam does mean that he has missed valuable class time last weekend. As expected, the students who attended all of the weekend sessions performed the best when it came to crunch time.
This was planned during our August Rakhine visit. It took a while to get up and running unfortunately. Small things such as the national election just got in the way of running the course! I started to teach on the second weekend of October.
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