refining

of course, life is hard at times...cuz that is life. we weren't created for an easy pain-free existence. we were created for more. that is what i have learned this past week after hearing on wednesday that my aunt beth, who was in the car accident a few weeks ago, passed away.

i cant really describe the weirdness of having someone die when you are so faraway. it is hard to say good-bye when in my mind she could still at home. im not there, how do i know she is really gone? it doesnt seem real. it was a painful few days of feeling so alone and like no one understood what was going on, but God has given me encouragement. after finally sharing with my friends here what happened, God has comforted me through them and through my amazing friends from home who have emailed me love and hugs, which is what i really needed right now.

i wasnt able to attend the funeral, but i wrote something that was read at the memorial service. i dont like being all open and gushy on my blog, but i think i will post what i wrote. i dont think it's that great because words seems so shalow when stuff like this happens. but i want to post it so everyone can read about my aunt, and why she meant so much to me and everyone she came in contact with. i want her example to live on forever.

MY AUNT BETH

About four weeks ago I was eating a lunch of spicy green curry at my Thai friend’s house. She was telling me about her aunt and how successful she was and how she admired her so much for working her way up the business ladder. This of course made me think of my Aunt Beth and how proud I am of her for different reasons. While my mouth tingled from my lunch, I began to boast to her about how amazing my Aunt Beth was.

I told her of my Aunt Beth’s typical day. She stood for her 8-hour shift as a cashier, scanning any garden supplies someone may need while blessing everyone who was lucky enough to go through her line that day. Driving away from Lowe’s, her fingers clutching the wheel were stained brown from the potting soil of the flowers that she found on sale to bring to my gardening mother. She zoomed home to switch cars to drive the handicap van to pick up my Aunt Rachel right when she finished working at the library. After walking in the door, she put a scrumptious dish in the oven right away, such as chicken a la king for dinner. Then she washed the stack of dishes that never seemed to disappear, while she picked up anything dropped on the floor during the day that my aunt or grandma couldn’t reach. If there was any time left before going to bed she might call up her dear friend since childhood who works in Pennsylvania to see how she is doing. Or maybe she could make cookies for her nieces to send them since they are all away at college. Or she might make a snack to bring to Sunday school the next day for church. Oh tomorrow is her day off! That means she would have time to pick up her friend who can no longer drive and take her out shopping and then get lunch.

She never stopped, but what is even more amazing is she never complained. I’m sure there were days when she got upset, when she didn’t want to go anymore, when she just wanted to quit, because Aunt Beth was human. But even if she felt like that, she still persevered. She might not have seen any reward for all her hard work day after day, never getting the praise she deserved. But that is not what she was living for, so maybe that is why you didn’t hear her complain much.

When I told my Thai friend about her she was in awe. But I hope she doesn’t see just that my Aunt Beth was so serving and giving, but I hope she sees that she didn’t do it for herself but because she lived for more than herself. She wasn’t living for the customers at the store, or her co-workers. She wasn’t living for her mother, her sisters, her brothers, or any other family. She wasn’t living for her friends. She was living for God. She wrote me a note when I went to New Zealand that she put in a present that said, “Open this when you feel lonely.” It says: “Sherri, I love you. I hope you’re enjoying yourself. Remember, God is always with you and He loves you very much. Aunt Beth.” That was her motivation for serving, not to try to win God’s love or the love of others, but to simply show others how God loves them very much.

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen in eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:16-18.

Teach the teacher..

DAY ONE DONE!

i taught for the first time at elite prep on sunday! ahhh! i was freaking myself out for most of the week. i was thinking, wow, how am i going to do this? i know NOTHING about how to prep people for the SAT..except for the fact that i wore a superman t-shirt and listened to classical music the night before i took it my second time because that was suppose to help you get a better score. yeah...and my score only went up 10 points after such efforts. astonishing!

yet, the place that we get our material from to teach our classes is so awesome. they give us all the grammar lessons we teach, so our job is to prep like crazy so we can become pros when instructing the 11th and 12th graders...acting as if we know what we are doing. at least that is what i was doing.

so i taught two different sessions for an hour and a half..even though i thought i wouldnt be able to fit everything in, it went by super fast, and i did have time to do stuff i didnt think i would be able to do.

i thought i would have to be really mean so i could keep control in the class, but most of the kids are pretty quiet and didnt give me any trouble...yet..but if they do such things as speak in a language other than english there is recourse. they have to eat a harry potter jelly bean, one of the gross flavors like vomit and boggers. they have to tell you what it tastes like too cuz if they dont they might have just swallowed it. i told the kids, i love harry potter, so i would be eager to spread some harry potter fun if i hear any other languages. most of the kids just looked freaked out after i said that, but someone in the second class laughed. how nice of them.

now i get to prepare to teach book club on saturday. i hope i can come up with some good curriculum for this 3-hour book club class on lives of a cell. how do i make a book about how all the world is like a cell exciting? im sure i will find a way...at least i hope so. i dont want the kids to hate me right away for giving them a boring book. maybe later, but not immediately.

GETTING TAUGHT THAI

i started my thai class yesterday. its going to be mon-fri from 8am-noon. it's intense! there are about 12 students in the class, most of them are korean, two are japanese, one english dude, and then me and my korean american friend from work. my khru (that means teacher in thai-- its not her first name which is what i thought for the first hour of class) is so hilarious! she will make fun of us when we say things funny or weird, but in a good way that makes the class lighthearted and not stressful. so she has been having lots of fun with me.

i usually am unsure about how to pronounce the vowels and constonants, and the five different tonal sounds, so when it's my turn to speak i say my answer in a confused, unsure way. khru kept laughing at me, and told me she loved me. at least i bring her some amusement! my homework is to learn my thai numbers. we have to go around and say how many problems we got wrong after we do an exercise, and i was the only one who couldnt remember how to say the numbers in thai. so i kept asking my friend secretly..khru caught on..oh well, she said next week if we speak in another language than thai we have to pay her 15 baht to go toward her future trip to hong kong. at least it's better than a harry potter jelly bean.

to bed i go...leave some love. =)

shake it like a polaroid picture

yes, these are little bunnies wearing outfits. this is at jj mart, a ginormous flea market where they sell everything from bunnies to jewelry to living room furniture to cute bags.

see a wee bit more pics, including pattaya...http://www.flickr.com/photos/55907373@N00/

Life does exist outside Bangkok!

FLEEING THE CITY

i have been pondering, do people live outside of the bustling city of bangkok? is there really more to thailand?

i discovered on monday there is! yeah, it's pretty amazing. i had the day off and of course i wanted to travel somewhere. especially since next week i start my thai language course! im so excited because elite, the place where im working, want the new teachers to go so we can adjust better to thailand. i cant wait cuz maybe after the course i will know when thai people are talking about me, so i can say something smart to them! oh, and it will also be nice, so i can show them how i want to learn their language too..

but i will be taking the course mon-fri in the morning before work, which means i dont really have any days off completely for a month. so if i wanted to see something...i had to do it now!

of course it is hard to find people to travel on mondays and tuesdays since most people are working. but my friend mariha, who is from england, said she would love to go somewhere with me! she arrived in bangkok a week ago to try to find a teaching job. then we met randomly at my friend's hostel. she just got a job, and hadnt started yet, so i got a travel buddy for the day!

i wanted to go to the beach so badly just to chill out. so we took the bus to pattaya, the closest beach...it was suppose to be a two hour journey, but it turned into four hours since the man with a lazy eye who worked for the driver kept leaping off the bus every 5 km to get more people to come on or he would buy food or chat with someone. it reminded me of kenya bus transport, at least there werent any chickens on it.

but we left early, so we still had time to relax on the beach. but first we got mangos with sticky rice and coconut milk!! it is a famous thai dessert, but i hadnt really seen it at many places yet. but they had perfect yellow mangos everywhere on the streets. so we stopped and had some for lunch..instead of dessert, but when you are on holiday anything goes. it was such a great combination-- the sticky, slightly salty rice with the sweet, soft, juicy mango and the smooth coconut milk to top it off. wow, i was in heaven for a little while.

then we chilled out on the beach for like five hours. so pattaya is more on the myrtle beach type of town since it is rather touristy and the tourists like to leave their trash behind on the shore. but i didnt mind, it was a beach and it was warm and i had a book. it was perfect, just what i needed. the only annoying thing was as we sat in our rented beach chairs, vendors would wander up to us trying to sell ice cream, perfume, fake coach bags, and fried spring rolls. i would look at my book and try to ignore them, but they were like flies that buzz around and even when you flick them away they just keep coming back.

ahhh...then we reached the point where we thought our arms were about to burn off, so it was time to go home. it only took two hours to go home. wow, but im so burnt. i couldnt sleep last night because i felt like my body was on fire. ahh...and i even wore sunblock. but it wasnt a bad price to pay for my first venture outside the city of life.

WORKING GIRL

so i completed my first week of a full-time job...and i enjoyed it! no way!

wed-fri i worked 11-7, which is perfect for a morning person like me..i can just make the most of my time. so nice..

since my first week was mainly observing, wed-fri i piddled around the office, asking my director if she needed any help. i did random stuff like define 190 words for one of the books i will be teaching at a book club. but even stuff like that i enjoy cuz i love words.

so i guess i should give the basics of what i will be up to. wed-fri is when we prep for the weekend when we teach. on saturday im going to be teaching a book club in the afternoon for three hours to 9-10th graders. the book club is suppose to help prepare them for the SAT without them knowing it sort of thing because its fun.

i thought i was going to teach two book club classes on two different books, so i read both of them intensely this past week. then my director walks in today, sits down to tell me that one thing she has learned while living in bangkok is how to be flexible..so im not going to actually teach those two classes, but teach another one and teach on a different book.

i was down with that because this morning i had attained a state of "oh my goodness..how am i going to prepare to teach two different three hour classes on the same day?! ahhhh!" so after she told me the change in plans, i felt more peace. yet, it was too bad i read those other books and im not doing them. i really liked one of them. "the unwanted" by kien nguyen. it's quite a graphic memoir of the life of a vietnamese american boy and his escape from vietnam after the war. so good, it really makes you appreciate freedom.

now i get to read and do a book club on "lives of a cell", which is just about as exciting as the title sounds. but it's ok, it might appeal to some of the kids, and that is all that matters. i can make it fun! at least that is what i tell myself..

then on THIS sunday i get to teach two one and a half hour classes on SAT writing. i love writing, but explaining all the grammar rules and such is going to be tough. especially to these crazy smart kids. when i was observing this one class this one girl just kept asking why why why...and i was like, wow, im glad im not up there trying to answer. but then i remembered i will be there this week. wow, at least when im weak, God is strong. =)

ok, im tired and not really going to read over the blog before i post it so please excuse the grammar mistakes and if my thoughts dont connect well. im going running tomorrow with a girl i work with at the park with the weird lizard so i have to get my rest in case i have to defend myself. thanks for reading..it makes me happy!

i will post pics soon...

im CELTAFIED

DIVINE VACUUM CLEANERS

so i taught my last observed class on tuesday. i was worried about it because i wanted to end on a good note. i wanted to feel like i came into the course knowing nothing about teaching at all, and now feel like i had learned a thing or two.

amazingly, my lesson went better than i thought it would, there were only a few mess ups…the reading i chose for the students was about buddhists monks in malaysia and how they couldn’t kill fire ants that were harming them during meditation because monks cant harm a living creature.

i wanted them to read the article to find out the method the monks used to try to get rid of the ants. it was with a vacuum cleaner. yet, i didn’t realize that in thailand, not many people use vacuum cleaners, since everyone usually uses brooms. so the students didn’t understand the question since I didn’t pre-teach vacuum cleaner…the things you learn when teaching in this land..

then one of my true/false questions was, if someone did kill the ants the monks would say it was the will of God. it was false, because the monks said it was the will of the universe, not God. yet, every student had it as true. this is because for most of them, since they are Buddhist, the universe and God are the same thing. yet, to me, they are totally different concepts. the students looked at me like i was a freak, when i tried to explain that it was false...go sherri, way to confuse innocent students yet again.

but it turns out, even though i had some lacking-in-awareness-of-the-culture-of-your-students-problems, i still got an above standard for my last lesson!! i was so excited and so relieved! i learned something!

WORTH IT?!

so all in all the course definitely was a GOOD thing, and i learned soooooo much through the intense, crazy four weeks. many of my classmates have been teachers for awhile, so the class radically changed a lot of the ways they look at teaching and helped them get rid of bad habits. yet, i now have this foundation of new methods of teaching, and not too many bad habits to get rid of yet...so it was even a plus, in some ways, to not have much experience. now i feel more confident to teach here in bangkok, and now i can go anywhere in the world and use my CELTA to teach...im glad i held out and struggled through. but soooooo glad it's over!!

i really loved my students!! our last day was sweet. we played review games, then we had pizza hut and dunkin donut holes. we had a huge picture taking fest, and the delightful pics can be found here...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/55907373@N00/

im going to miss my students, but we all have emails. and it's sweet cuz i have already hung out with some of the students because yesterday they wanted to go to church with us. i learn so much from them, i feel so blessed!

HIGH LIGHT

after i finished my course i decided it was necessary to do something celebratory...which has included watching harry potter 5 at an i-max, getting good coffee, eating at an amazing salad buffet, pizza, and getting ice cream shakes.

but then yesterday i finished off my celebrations-of-surviving-celta-sessions by getting my hair cut and highlighted!

ahh! i was a lil freaked out, cuz i didnt know which hairdresser would know how to cut non-asian people's hair, and if they would speak English well enough to know what i wanted. but two of my classmates got their haircut at a place, and thought they did a good job. so i got a 50% off card from one of them, was given a name of who to ask for, and went for it!

i just walked in, said changa, and then he came right over to help me out. i told him i wanted layers but my hair to not be much shorter, and highlights. he comprehended what i was saying...at least i hoped by his clear english response that he did. then he directed me over to a row of computers sitting behind swivel chairs. he told me to sit while they highlighted my hair. so i got to email for an hour or so while my he and another worker spoke in thai the whole time while putting tinfoil all over my head. i wondered the whole time what they must have been saying about this weirdo american girl...

then for the next hour he cut my hair and kept up his convo with his other worker. he is definitely an artist, and even told me he sees cutting hair as art. which i think is what a good hairdresser should believe. anyways, i came out with an asian look to my golden brown locks. he straightened it, and i put that pic online, but i dont think its going to look straight again for a year because i didnt bring a straightner with me. i like curly better i have decided..anyways, im still trying to get used to the layers, but i think im going to like it.

my doorman was the first person to notice! he said, "oh, your hair is different color! i like!" this was after he said, "hello teacher"...

=)

so this week, on wednesday, i get to start my job! im excited! i hope that i can catch on to teaching at elite and how to get my head around the SAT and how to explain it to these super smart kids..im excited for the next adventure!

by the way..thanks for all your words of encouragement while i was doing the course! it really pulled me through. i love you all so.