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 :-)
