The Border, The Training, A Birthday and a Celebration of Friendship Meal.

The day began with a trip to the Friendship Bridge which links Mae Sot, Thailand with Myawaddy, Burma. Sheila and Geoff visited here last year. In the first photo you can see Geoff with Myawaddy across the muddy river. So Geoff is standing in Thailand looking across to Burma.











Murray had never visited here and it was a sobering experience for him, Fiona and Louise. Guardian Angel took us up river to where Burmese people cross the river. It was quite unbelievable to see people risking a lot to cross in a big rubber tube.












Unfortunately things don't always go too well and we saw some Thai soldiers then stopped some people about to cross and were probably asking for money to allow them to cross. This all goes on with the awareness of the authorities. It's chilling to watch this, mainly because it is to common here and so alien to us. Louise was horrified and very angry to see this abuse of power.
In the afternoon, we had a teacher training session with the Hle Bee teachers. We covered classroom management, simple craft ideas and an introduction to Emotional Literacy - all in 90 mins. One of the joys of this for us was that there was funding for this from the Global Schools Partnership and we were able to give the teachers 1000 baht for participating in the training session. This is 15 UK pounds and is equivalent to about 10 days' pay. The session was a challenge for Guardian Angel to interpret for. 'Do you know cognitive intelligence, GA? Do you know body language?' And of course he does.


In the evening, we took the 25 school staff and families out for a meal at the night market. We met at 6.30pm and didn't leave until 10.30pm which is a long time for the staff who normally always return to school/home (as most of them live there) by 9pm latest. It was one of the most pleasant evenings I have ever enjoyed. It was so delightful to see everyone laughing, happy and chatting. the Burmese-English barriers are being overcome as we gradually learn words from each others language and can communicate more and more. It was Myint Su's birthday and she was 9 so that made it very special. She is an adorable, able, artistic child who speaks Thai, Burmese and English really well. She's like a wee parrot and just soaks in language. She is the daughter of one of the teachers and along with Than Than, her cousin, she is into everything, knows everybody and everything about everything! She ended up negotiating our bus to Bangkok with the Thai bus driver!

The school community presented us all with lovely gifts, which was quite overwhelming. I'm sure you can imagine. They welcome us, they give us so much and then they give us gifts. We all felt very humbled by their huge generousity.

And finally the best present of all, for over a year, Guardian Angel has been painting a portrait of Geoff and Sheila from a wee passport photo we gave him. Just look at this!

An amazing ending to an another amazing day in Hle Bee.

During the evening however, we saw something that deeply saddened us all. One of the girls in school lives by the market and took us to see her home. We will post more about this next week as it had such a profound impact on us all.