One week at the PDO

How time flies – I can’t believe that I’ve already been here for a week now! On the other side there where already happening so many things, that it could easily fill two or three weeks ;-)

So last Friday I was picked up and warmly welcomed by Milow (his English name) who’s working here at the PDO. After the one hour drive from the airport to the City, I was shown my private room in the girl’s dormitory and thankfully fell asleep on my bed (all in all it took me 27 hours to come from Austria to Mandalay).

On the following day I was given a tour through the area of the school, met quite a few teachers and coordinators of different sections and was introduced to the principal. The effect of that tour was that my head was stuffed with new names, information and places so that I was totally confused where to find which office for which department, different corridors and classes or even my own dormitory! Eventually I found out that all the buildings are built in one straight line, so that I could just start at the beginning of our street and look for the right building and then go on with finding the right floor…

Milow invited me to join him and another very nice girl from the PDO, two Burmese nurses and four German nurses and doctors on their excursion to Mingun on Sunday – so when I climbed into the truck that morning I met those four women from Germany and they were also immediately able to help me quite a lot, by explaining how things work around here. So we took the boat to Mingun, and while they made a medical check of the kids in the Kindergarten there, I was shown the building itself and had time to explore the pagodas and monastery together with the Burmese girl. Even though I’ve been here two years ago, I still was so amazed by those places! Don’t know what I liked best: the white Pagoda in front of a blue sky or the sunset on the river at our way back home.

 

School normally starts on Monday, but on this one there was still some holiday and so I was still able to have another day off. When my family and I were in Mandalay for the first time two years ago I met some students and monks on our way to the Mandalay Hill and they just wanted to improve their English by talking to tourists, so we exchanged our Facebook-contacts and regularly wrote messages since. So on Monday morning one of those friends asked whether I’d like to meet his relatives – shortly after I was once again sitting in the back of a truck, where I was greeted by two families and they invited me to come to their house and have lunch with them. Everyone was being really lovely and caring (even though there were some language barriers), I was told to refer to them as my Burmese family and the tables were full of rice, salads, meat and vegetables – it really wasn’t difficult to make myself feel like home there ;-)

In the afternoon four of the boys from the morning picked me up again and together we first went to the Kuthodaw pagoda and then started to climb the stairs of the Mandalay Hill. Well, what can I say – is there anything more beautiful than seeing everything of the land below you turning golden while the pagoda behind you glitters through its thousands of little mirrors in the dark-blue sky? And all that without being too kitschy, even though my description kinda sounds like now… on our way back to town they bought different kinds of food and I was once again invited by them and ate dinner in their monastery – what else could you want?

 

On Tuesday my very first day of school started and I actually found my classroom! As I was told by some students, their teacher was just gone to University and so I stood there on my own and tried to make the best of it. Luckily I had prepared some pictures of Austria and I also told them something about myself, so I guess it all wasn’t even that bad. The next lesson I was supposed to do some “observations” but when the teacher arrived, he told me that he hadn’t prepared anything and ask me to hold his lesson. So I did everything again and in the end I somehow became the Geography teacher for this class. But the kids are really lovely and eager to study, even though the discipline during the lessons can’t be compared to the system I know. But in the following lessons I (partly) managed to get them to raise their hands and answer individually, instead of the “normal” habit to answer in one choir or shout anything that comes to their mind. In the meantime I even found some books with exercises in them and it’d say that this helped me quite a lot to bring some structure and improvement into the class :-)