Salam (peace be upon you) my brothers and sisters, sawadi kap? It is "How are you?" in Thai. Recently, alhamdulillah, I went to Thailand from the 17th of May 2011 till 29th of May 2011 for an English camp in an Islamic environment, to teach the kids there (they were like 15 till 18 and I'm still 19 but whatever, am older, hee) English. They were from all over the Southern part of Thailand, from 6 or 7 provinces mashAllah. The place itself is very nice, the event was held in one of the schools in Satun, border of Perlis. The school was surrounded by high hills and mountains, so for those of you who like environment and away from cities, that is the place to be.
So I'll make this a short one inshAllah coz u know, we men don't like to talk or type a lot. So we went to Hat Yai, Thailand from Malaysia on the 17th May by bus and reached there on the 18th in the morning. There, we rested for a while ate, bathe, and recruited other members of the committees. At around 11am we made a move to Satun and it took us around 2 hours to get there.We reached there safely alhamdulillah after two hours of ride or sleep shall I say.
The moment we reached there, I was like, "Yo this place is remote man, awesome, mashAllah". The place was far from the busy streets, some of the people could speak Malay (thatis REALLY good news to me) but mostly Thai, it was surrounded by trees and hills and cows and cows. There is nothing much to do as in activity wise there, so most of the time we (or I) will either sleep, eat, bathe, eat, read, eat and so on.
Alright, before anything, you should know that there were 10 instructors all together, it was also divided into reading, writing, speaking, and listening.... So my Indonesian brother by the name of Faizal, and I were in charge of reading... So here it goes... Bismillah..
So the first day of teaching had arrived and my heart was thumping like there is Muhammad Ali inside punching on the speed bag. I didn't know what to do as it was my first experienced ey. Ok scratch that, I'm going to break it down to a few events to make it vivacious shall I say. First day, we asked the students to introduced themselves in front of class coz we wanted to remit and demolish their shyness to speak whenever necessary(See, the students there are different, they WERE not confident of their English, and it was broken as well). Alhamdulillah, everything went well. Then we proceeded with the Aladdin story that the committee have prepared for us. During nightfall, we had a meeting, and alhamdulillah, they agreed that we were there not to teach but to spark in their hearts to learn English and continue learning even after the camp.
2nd day, we(me and my partner) made the class more lively, we asked them to participate and we explained in A LOT of languages(coz the kids were from diff backgrounds)....One time, to explain the word 'wife', it went like this, "Ok brothers and sisters, a wife is 'parayya' (Thai), 'parayya' is 'isteri' (Malay), 'isteri' is 'zaujah' (Arabic) and a 'zaujah' is a ... wife, durh", they were all laughing and smiling and that made me feel good, hee.
3rd day, I'll share with u an incident, while we were reading, to make sure they understood the word 'afraid', I asked them to make a sentence, one from the brothers' side, and one from the sisters'....The brothers did their part, it was cool, then one sister put her hand up, she said...
4th day came, my partner and I were dumbfounded-ly clueless of what to do in class and I kept on praying and bam alhamdulillah, I asked em what did they wana do, they replied "GAAAAAMMMEESS!", so we asked each student to make a sentence, they go one by one but the catch is that they have to be connected and in the end it has to make one whole story, and mashAllah it went smoothly with all four classes...
After the camp, we had a few days to visit Koh Lipe which is translated to Lipe Island and it was like a reward for all of us alhamdulillah, very kind and generous of the Thai comm...I'll let the pictures do the talking...
Ps: I learned a lot compared to teaching, I could only teach so much really, but I gained insight to how the people of the Southern part were living(majority Muslims btw), their culture, how they speak, what they eat, and I even gained weight too!! & my advice to everybody is that, be a teacher even for one day, then you'll love, cherish, respect and adore your teachers even more, and that is one of my dreams for now, after retiring, ama be a teacher inshAllah....
Till next time, and sorry I haven't updated for quite a while....Salam, love u for Allah.
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