Sept 4: Great Day of English Instruction

Today we had our penultimate English lesson with the KWAT interns. Leigh Ann also spent some of the day working on the migrant exchange video translation with Mai. This video will be used to increase awareness about the experiences of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand and will provide GlobeMed members with a more in-depth perspective of the community we serve.

In our English lessons, we warmed up by asking questions about each other’s favorite things and following up with two more questions as a way to extend conversations. It was very successful- the interns asked lots of interesting questions of each other.

Afterwards, we had the interns write 10-sentence stories about themselves. We were blown away by the depth of language they used to express the enormous struggles they had been through. It was incredible to learn about everyone’s personal story in a way that revealed how much more confident they had become since the beginning of the class.

At lunch, John said a wonderful prayer in English and greatly impressed us all. The Kachin food was delicious, as always.

To finish, we played two truths and a lie. The interns came up with really creative and plausible lies to trick the others, and we learned lots of interesting facts about them. We found out that Rocker can speak Chinese and that Geis won an award for dancing from the minister of the Kachin State when she was three.

In the afternoon, Mai visited our apartment to finish the video translation with Leigh Ann and talk with us. We debated the merits of different Thai fruits with her – Nick likes longan, but Mai thinks that langsat is better. We were happy to spend some more one-on-one time with Mai before we leave Chiang Mai.