Vagabond With Flowers: Lately...

Over the past few days, the Isara house has become livelier! Four new volunteers from the U.S. have been so kind to give their time and energy to be a part of the Isara community. Travis, who joined us on Monday is from Chicago. Cyncerie & Alex from San Francisco and Melanie from San Diego all joined us on Tuesday. Kirk & Ming said that this is the most volunteers they've had the first year they were in operation. I'm really excited to have them join us, it's been awhile since Lara and I had people to hang out with aside from the kids, Ming & Kirk.

Switching rooms with Kirk & Ming to make more room for the new volunteers

Our new room (Kirk & Ming's old room) + Melanie's new space

Before they arrived, we also had a chance to teach with another volunteer from Germany. Although, Lothar has only been here for 3 weeks, he contributed generously to the growth of this charity. He helped with the Halloween party by paying for the drinks, candy and snacks and also stepped in to teach a few classes as well while we were in Laos. It was a pleasure meeting you, Lothar. I'm happy that this charity has reached further out to people all over the world. Thank you for being so sweet and helpful to the kids. The kids won't forget "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean", for sure. Your presence was always positive and warm-hearted. Safe travels back to Germany!

A few days ago, we were able to have our first yoga class here at Isara, led by Lara. This is the first class that she taught with more than 3 people, me being the only consistent student. I'm happy that she's able to work on her teaching skills in different concentrations with a range of ages and outside of the classroom. She did a great job teaching! I think it's important for yoga classes to have the right elements in instruction, one being the calm and soothing voice of an instructor and the instant welcoming feeling of understanding that this space is used for silence and mindfulness. And I also think it's important to help first timers ease into this practice because it may appear intimidating to someone who has never practiced it. This is just the beginning, Lara!

Yoga at 10am! Haha.

Here are also some photos of our mini-photoshoot for the homepage!

As far as teaching goes, the students are progressing well. We experience quite a bit of frustration when teaching at times, but that's just a simple motivator to be patient and work on my teaching skills. It's difficult to communicate with our beginners class because they are so scattered in thought sometimes and learning to keep their attention for an additional hour out of the day after spending the previous 7 hours in school! We are lucky enough to have Party & Bell help with the translation, otherwise, I have no idea how we would be able to do it! This week's lesson covers prepositions, which gives allows them to be a little bit more active in class. This was also Travis' first day teaching.

For the advanced class, we decided to give them an opportunity to express themselves artistically by writing a Japanese poem called a Haiku. I'm sure you guys wrote one of these when you were in elementary school. I don't remember writing one of these when I was younger, but I'm sure if I did, it wouldn't have been any good! I was very impressed by the poems that the students produced. It was a process to construct these poems, but they did a great job overall. We try to reinforce the language as much as possible during class by asking our students to speak English and sharing with us their work by reading them aloud (I have some video's I'll be posting of them reciting the poems! I'll post those later). Initially, I thought this would be somewhat difficult for them to comprehend because when native Thai speakers speak English, more syllables are produced than necessary and could make writing a Haiku a bit hard-- but of course, the world of teaching is always dynamic and unpredictable-- the students were amazing! Some were actually comedic and deeply profound. Here are just some examples of the poems.