On Sunday, we had the first English class with the women’s group. The whole village had been invited by the governor during Mass, and eventually around 15 women showed up. They arrived slowly, one by one, and this made us understand how learning to wait is going to be part of our experience here at the village. Afraid of sitting in the front rows, surrounded by the children they take care of, women of all ages took a place on the benches of the church and put all their effort to study a language with which they had never been in contact before.
At first, we made the mistake of using our extremely limited Thai skills to facilitate the process, but they steadily corrected us to Karen. Luckily, in the morning, we had met a nice English-speaking girl who served as an interpreter during the lesson. Children were running around the whole time, and they were playing the game “touch-the-farang”, us being extremely exotic in the context of the village.
We started from the very basics (“hello”, “what’s your name?”) and it was nice to see how the women tried hard to communicate and memorize. We realized that within an hour and a half their English got better than our baby-Thai.
They want to have more classes per week, to meet more often in order to learn more. That is yet to be discussed, and we have to say that we do feel good after our Sunday evening class, much rewarded in terms of both learning outcomes, and warmth and appreciation on the part of the women.
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