Though there’s much more to be said about my trip to Australia, life in Vientiane continues to pass by quicker than you can say bo mak kin tin gai (I don’t like to eat chicken feet). So I’ll interrupt the whales and kookaburras for some updates from this side of the Mekong.
One of the most quintessentially Vientiane photos I’ve taken.
The seasons, they are a-changing. The rainy season, whose daily deluges we have been enjoying (or suffering…depending on if we’re indoors or out when they hit) for the past few months has officially come to an end, with the end of Buddhist Lent (awk pansaa) last week. This was celebrated with the seemingly universal holiday mix of the traditional with the modern and absurd, and I’ll have more to say about the Boatracing Festival soon. For the moment, the rain and the heat have yet to fully loosen their grip on the city, but some new crispness in the air at night hints at the “cool” season to come.
The third week of term is already well underway, and classes are no longer feeling new. Once again, I’m teaching my preferred mix of young and old learners, advanced and beginners. I’m come to really appreciate the opportunity for variety in my teaching life at VC. The kids are adorable and so full of energy, but sometimes I need a break to talk to people I can relate to at a higher level. Conversely, when I’m facing a room of silent college students (having flashbacks to some of my own distracted precepts at Princeton, in which I repentantly say “Okay, now I know how it feels, I’m sorry for not participating more!”) it’s nice to escape to a Young Learners class where stickers will elicit unbounded enthusiasm. To put it in another way–I don’t have a favorite class. They all balance each other so nicely.
This term I’ve got two groups of Young Learners, one of which is the youngest I’ve had yet. Several of the students are only 6 years old, and painfully cute, but also painfully challenging to deal with at times. I’m glad that I’ve been studying Lao because I can understand the translations of almost everything I’m attempting to teach them. But sometimes even a common language won’t help translate 6-year-old logic. Last week, one of the tiniest boys in my class walked up to me in the middle of the lesson, his hands in the respectful nop position, and said “Khoi pen wad.” (I have a cold). Not sure what he wanted me to do about it, I nodded, and he sat back down and proceeded to pour an Oishi Green Tea all over the table.
I’m especially excited about my advanced classes this term, as I’m teaching both Personal Identity and Creative Writing, both of which involve reading literature and talking about the elements of storytelling and self-expression. This is something I like teaching as much as I’ve enjoyed studying it over the years. Finally, I’m teaching a group of daytime students who are studying to go to do their Master’s in New Zealand next year. They’re in the final term of study before their departure, and I’m doing Information Literacy with them, yet another class that brings me back to college in my mind, as we talk about the organization and vocabulary of Western university libraries. They’re all excited about watching New Zealand proceed to the Rugby World Cup final this weekend, as are all of the fans of Lao Rugby here.
The Cat: ungrateful and audacious, but hard not to love. Photo credit: Ilse
In the week before I left for Australia I rather haphazardly shuttled all of my stuff (it’s incredible how much you can accumulate in a year!) from my old house to a new house. Probably the most amusing thing to move was our adopted stray cat, which got carted over in a carrier on the back of a motorbike in the pouring rain. Luckily The Cat, as it’s known, seems to more than have recovered from this traumatizing experience and made the new house its kingdom. It’s lot in life has improved dramatically since it found us last year but, in typical feline fashion, it shows little to no gratefulness. The new house has an admittedly strange aesthetic, with sliding class doors in random places, mirrored columns, and waist-high display cases filled with old dishes and Hmong dolls, but it’s beginning to feel more like home.
I’m living with three new PiA fellows. Mike is also a teacher at VC, and is volunteering for Lao Rugby. Ilse works at the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, and she and Kyle, our fourth housemate, who works for the World Wildlife Fund, have already managed to guest lecture about environmental issues at Vientiane College. All three of them have blogs as well this year, so if you can’t get enough Lao updates, here are some more, each with a very different style.
View from our driveway. Photo credit: Ilse