Girl I can thrill you more than any _____________ would ever dare try.

I'm enjoying the quiet of an unexpected day off- immediately following the madness of a day with....well...with kindergarteners :)

My placement has been with the 3rd and 4th graders, so I haven't spent time with any other classes than theirs. They're absolutely the perfect age- although their English is limited, we can communicate with the added help of mime, and Blackberries. (Totally not kidding, either- they have seen pictures of my apartment, pictures of my family and friends, pictures of F. Scott, and a picture of Josh Grissom before he went out on Halloween- luckily they understood the concept of "Halloween" or else I think they would have been purely frightened at Josh's Rocky Horror Picture Show costume. Wait, I think they were STILL frightened of it!!) We have also very kindly dialed a number of people in the states for them to say hello to, including my mother, who reacted very kindly to the 12:30am wake up call. On a schoolnight.

But anyway, yesterday the English teacher I assist was assigned to chaperone a field trip for kindergarteners, so off I went with her.

These children don't often see the likes of the field trip we set off on yesterday- in fact, I believe they don't EVER see the likes of it. A former volunteer through CCS (five years ago) is a man named Bob Geddes, and he is a generous, philanthropic retiree who loves to travel and seems determined to spread the wealth the universe kindly bestowed on him (as he puts it, he was hit by "buckets of good luck" in this life). Bob has managed to find quite a few ways to go about this amazing karmic disposal. This particular adventure was a gift to the school from him- Bob asked them to pick a field trip that they wouldn't normally get to do, and to "send him the bill." (Unfortunately, a little more work was due on Bob's part, as Thais are so kind and submissive that they simply didn't feel it was polite to abundantly spend Bob's money for him.) A little translation and administrative work later, the field trip was arranged and Bob arrived in Bangkok.

In a fortuitious turn of events, I met Bob last Friday, when he arrived at the school in advance of the field trip. Perfect timing- being the other lone farang (the Thai word for "foreigner") at the school, I was invited to join them :)

To say "let's go to the aquarium, take a drive past the beach, and go to the zoo, all before 3pm" sounds like something any school teacher in America would deem an act of complete lunacy- but mai pen rai when in Thailand, so that is actually exactly what we did. This was the first field trip out of Bangkok for the kindergarteners (and out of Bangkok we did go- 80km, in fact) but they behaved like absolute angels. Separated into their three age groups by hat color (red, yellow, and green indicated 3, 4, and 5 year olds, in that order), they were surprisingly easy to keep track of! And they were absolutely enamored with the entire day. We saw eels, we saw white tigers, we saw monkeys, we saw Nemo, we ate ice cream, we ate banana bread and drank orange juice boxes, we rode through a safari, and we were entertained by a tour company who sang songs on a microphone at the front of our unbelievably comfortable double-decker buses. (Bob leaned over to me and said, "I guess these are some sort of Thai version of Jay Leno for kids?!") The entire day was really incredible, especially as it was such a treat to the kids- and they knew it.

At one point, Bob even came across three young boys who had been sent on the field trip without money for ice cream. I'll give you three guesses as to how much longer it took for those children to have ice cream, just like the rest of their classmates.

I can see clearly that there are situations where a person CAN make a clear difference- building a home with Habitat for Humanity, or making a donation to the Breast Cancer Foundation in the name of research- but sometimes, a contribution comes in a much smaller form. I think that sometimes we as Americans want to see the results of our work- and when we can't measure them, it frustrates us. In looking at the work I've done since being here, and hearing other people's experiences as volunteers in foreign countries, it's not quite what we thought it would be. As Bob put it, sometimes we're really just there as goodwill ambassadors. I certainly don't know how much English any of the students I've worked with will take from my three short weeks in their classroom- but I do know they probably take away an overall memory of the steady stream of CCS volunteers and will have a better understanding of the language, having grown up with it in their classrooms. (We certainly didn't have a steady stream of German teachers in Medford- otherwise I might be able to sprecken zie Deutsche a little better. Or at least spell it correctly.) I also have learned that sometimes it's really just about putting a smile on their face. I rode through the safari next to a young girl who was my absolute best friend during the ride- we were pointing out the animals to each other and making the accompanying noises for each one (I have to work on my lion roar) and it warmed my heart when I'd miss something and she would grab my knee and point excitedly. Oh my gosh, the monkey!! How did I almost miss the monkey?! ;)

Sometimes, they're even the ones putting the smile on MY face.

My complete favorite here is a girl named Save- she's in the 4th grade class and we barely understand each other- but yet we totally do. I have her email address, her number programmed into my phone, and her picture attached to the contact entry- not that I have ANY idea how productive our contact can be besides, "Good morning!" To which she (like every well-taught student in Bangkok) will reply, "Good morning, how are you?" When you reply back with, "I'm fine, thank you, and you?" you are inevitably greeted with "I'm fine, thank you, and you?" The hilarious cycle never fails to make me giggle.

Tomorrow is my last day at placement, and really- I could stay another month. Chuwanna has been kind enough to let me teach this week's lesson plans on Michael Jackson- so we're doing an in-depth study of Thriller. For serious. They've got little coloring books and an exercise where they complete the sentences (using Night words- "midnight, dark, moonlight", etc-- for anyone following this blog, I did clearly try to keep the running theme of daytime/nighttime in selecting this lesson plan, haha!) and I've got the CD and DVD to entertain them with as well. Okay, and I'm not gonna lie, at the end of class we totally push the desks back and I'm teaching them the Thriller dance. I figure, at the end of the day, at least they're getting to practice their English counting in the 8 counts.

Hearing thirty little Thai voices go "5,6,7,8!!!" is about the CUTEST thing you've ever heard, in your life. Period. Hands down. End of story.