Mingalarbar from Myanmar (part 2)

Day 3-5: Teaching English

Not sure what type of game this is

Before going to Myanmar, my image of what kind of place Yangon/Myanmar would be was mostly from the magazine articles I had read in Time Magazine and also from the movie "The Lady, so while we were sight seeing the first two days, I was surprised by many things.

The roads in Yangon are nicely paved, streets are clean and well kept, traffic was orderly, many people are able to speak in English and their accent is quite easy to understand.The city seems like it is doing well, there aren't a lot of noticeable beggars, everyone seems to be busy and have a job.

School building corridor

This may not be the case in some of the rural areas in Myanmar, but that's for another trip. Hopefully I will also get to go into the villages one day.

Day 3-5 are the days when we go to the school, located in the outskirts of Yangon, so it took us about half an hour to drive there. In Yangon city, motor bikes are not allowed, so you won't see any on the roads, but as we go to the rural area, motor bikes are allowed and you'll see that that is the main form of transportation.

Water Break!

The purpose of this trip was to visit Pastor Va Bi, his church and to teach english as a way of spreading the gospel. Pastor Va met our church pastor at an Asian church retreat and invited us to come visit.

For the three days that we taught, we taught a bunch of different lessons, the alphabet, greetings, directions, told stories etc. But we totally underestimated the students. We had no idea the standard of English and thought we were teaching students that have never had an English lesson. Boy was I surprised! The students knew all the alphabets and they are very quick to learn and are so serious about learning.

Compared to the students I have seen in Hong Kong, Canada, China, the students in Myanmar are much more fun to teach because they like to have fun, but they also WANT to learn!

I try to teach something useful, and then also make sure to reinforce it with games or songs so that they will remember more.

They've never had teaching material that was so visual, I'm happy that I spent the time to colour in all those letters!

First we started off with the alphabet, and I prepared some laminated cards with the alphabet and a word that begins with the alphabet. Their eyesight is extraordinary! The cards are A4 size, and the word is probably easy to see if you are standing right in front of the card, but for some reason they were able to see if even if they say in the middle of the room! Everytime I asked them if they knew what this letter stood for, they were always able to tell me the word on the card! And if I covered it up they were also able to spell a lot of the words.

And then when I taught them a song, they had their notebooks and pens out and were ready to copy down all the words. Some of them were able to copy the song very quickly. It's like they have photographic memory. I know if I had asked a similar bunch of students in HK or Canada, they would have struggled as they copied each line, messing up words and the order of the lines.... but the students there surprised me with how good they are!

 right photo: this little guy went home and practiced! before coming to class the next day, all from memory!

To teach them numbers and body parts, we played a game where they had to listen to the instruction about how many hands and how many feet can touch the floor, so this leads to a bit of fun, as people try to hold poses with one leg in the air or both hand and foot in the air.

Another game that we played was to practice giving and listening to directions (go, stop, turn right, turn left, turn around, behind, under, over etc.) We took all the chair ands piled them up in different shapes to create obstacles. Then the team had to guide one blind folded person around the obstacles to the end and shake a hand. This was a lot of fun for the kids to watch and also be blind folded.

drawing of my mom!

Each day not only did we teach them English, but we also had art classes. They really enjoyed drawing some of them and they also got to paint stain glass, draw faces on ping pong balls, and illustrate the story of Noah and his Ark.

The students are all very talented and although the teacher says that they have never been taught or had art classes, some of them drew very well! We told the class one day before that we would be drawing still life of fruits the next day. He went home and practiced from memory of the still life drawing that he saw as a sample. We saw his drawing the next day and it looked exactly the same!

 

my face on a ping pong! :)

Although the classrooms are sparsely furnished and we had only natural sunlight and open windows for ventilation, I didn't feel as tired while teaching (it was more tiring to go sight seeing). For this I am very thankful that I enjoyed it and didn't regret going on this trip. Although my work life has been very busy the last few weeks in Hong Kong, and preparing the materials for this trip was not easy because I didn't have much time and energy, it all turned out very well when I was in Myanmar. I look forward to the next time that I can go back and teach - Pastor Va has invited me to go back for 3 months so that I can teach more in depth.

Another one of Pastor Va's initiatives is an orphanage that is close to the school, here there are about 30 children who live together from age 3 to 17. Their environment looks sparse, but I think they are also very happy. Many of the children who live here also attended the classes we gave at the school.

 

Recently there are new plans for expansion, as Pastor Va's ministry seems to be receiving a lot of blessings. The church was able to purchase another lot of land next to its existing one, and Pastor Va recently received AUD 40,000 to build a new house, and the contractor built him a house that costs more, but was happy to cover it himself.

 

Pastor Va is not building a new building for the orphanage so they don't have to sleep in bamboo houses, the school building is newly built and he plans to add more wings to the school as there are only 6 classrooms now.

As I was teaching, I didn't have much opportunity to take photos, I hope that if I'm back for a longer time on my next trip, I'll be able to see more of Myanmar in other provinces and villages.