Aung Myae Oo (Sagaing, Myanmar) – part 2 (school)

The next day, Marc and I got into our stride, helping in the clinic; “Markus” called us into a meeting in the evening (the first actual sit-down any of us had had with him). We thought he had noticed the shopping we had done and wanted to hear our thoughts and suggestions for the school.

As it turned out, he told us the founder of Mudita Foundation would arrive the next day and made it clear to us he wanted us all at our correct posts (i.e. not all in the clinic) – in the morning, I was to go help the teacher in the 6^th grade English class, Marc was to help in the Kindergarten and Elna, Agata and Karolina were allowed to stay in the clinic. In the afternoon, Marc and I were allowed to join in the clinic.

I insisted (with a bit of difficulty from a language perspective) to receive the school book the children were using, so I could review it and prepare for the next day; finally, I was told someone would give it to me after the meeting. Marc was shown the kinderkarten and I was supposed to be shown to my class in the morning. After the meeting, everyone left and nobody gave me the English book.

The next morning, I met one of the teachers in front of the school and she explained I would be teaching two classes, with a free period in between. She (finally) gave me the book and told me they were on page 36. She also informed me that the English teacher was absent and I’d be giving the class alone.

It would be too long to go into detail about how the class went, but in short it was pretty disastrous: despite being grade 6, very few, if any, of the 60 students in my first class understood any English, except to recite the contents of their book. I tried to explain the exercise they had to do (to write an imaginary postcard), but to no avail.

The most confusing part, at first, is that they answer “yes” to pretty much everything. So when I asked if they understood the exercise, they all said “yes”, then started writing. After a couple of minutes, I noticed they were simply copying the instructions from their book. I decided to change tack, and instead tried to get the class to work together on the postcard. It worked marginally better, though I still don’t know if they fully understood what they wrote.

Most of the kids know how to say “what’s your name?” And “How are you?” (or chant “Hello teacher, how are you?”) but they don’t all know what they’re saying, so they ask “what’s your name?” about a dozen times, just to say something in English to the volunteers.

Having learned from the first class, the second lesson was easier.

That evening, we were introduced to the founder of Mudita foundation, a German who had discovered Buddhism and meditation about a decade ago and had found out about Aung Myae Oo school in 2015 andd got involved in financing and managing it. During the group dinner, I said “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name”, to which he answered “Markus”. Seeing my confusion, he told me the project manager we had been calling Markus was in fact called Peto. He took the opportunity to ask Peto to correct volunteers when they called him Markus (spoiler: he still doesn’t to this day). The fact that there is no nurse in the clinic also came as a surprise to him.

Over the next couple of days, we had the opportunity to address a number of issues with him.

The next day, I discovered the English teacher was still absent, but based on the experience of the previous day, I managed my two classes marginally better.