Namsom & Nong Khai

Nong Khai

When travelling, especially for an extended period, there is always a balance sought between spending quality time in one place vs moving on to the next in order to feel that you are taking full advantage of your surroundings. It’s a personal choice. As a whole our travels have had us on the move, though still compromising some countries/destinations we would have liked to visit so that we could dedicate pockets of time for certain areas and the people living there, a little bit more intimately. Volunteering as an English teacher is an excellent way to achieve that goal and is what brought us up to a NE Thailand, a less frequented corner of the country, for the last few weeks of December.

Our volunteer program, Travel to Teach, is headquartered in Nong Khai, a midsize northeast Thai town that rests the width of the Mekong River from Laos. We shared a two story home in the center of town with fellow volunteers from Scotland, New Zealand, Holland, Germany, and the States for our kick off weekend, completing a short culture & language orientation, sampling the local sweet sausages and even joining a birthday party for one of the friendly local T to T employees.

Our volunteer school was actually in the small town of Namsom 3 hours from Nong Khai. Nong Khai served as our base for the orientation weekend and then again, following our two weeks of teaching, as a convening place for the Christmas holidays.

Joyce, a Travel to Teach coordinator and her boyfriend Prik, at our Christmas Eve dinner.

It felt like Christmas in the corner of our room, thanks to a care package from home and some gifts we bought for each other along the way.

Skype with Christy's family on NY's Christmas Day (our Dec 26).

A sculpture garden in Nong Khai, built around the 1970's. Prior to Thailand, this artist was asked to leave Laos, for his controversial dramatic style.

Namsom

Namsom is one of the last places you’d pick to visit in Thailand. It doesn’t appear in a single guidebook. It is of reasonable size, 2000-3000 population, but has zero tourist infrastructure; Not a single place that offers a bed for the night. We couldn’t even find Namsom on a map until we came across a wall sized regional map in the Nong Khai volunteer dorm.

These are all qualities that make it a perfect place to visit as a volunteer. Besides us, two other volunteers stayed in our comfortable, hammock filled home “Ban Farang”:translated-house of the foreigners. For our 2 weeks there, we were the only westerners we saw in town, with the exception of one former volunteer staying with a friend and a few non-thais who had married locals. This brought a level of novelity to our visit and much hospitality from the locals. They offered us meals, called out “hello-hello” as we biked by,and excercised much patience on the badminton court.

A standard day:
7:30: Wake, eat cornflakes & yogurt & bike to the secondary school a mile and a half away.
Optional:
Wake an hour earlier to donate food to the monks that walk through the neighbourhood.
8:45: First class starts. With the Thai teacher’s assistance (usually) lead the class through Christmas songs, a play The Enormous Turnip, basic conversational practice or games of “Hangman”, which could lead to splitting the class into two teams for family feud style challenges
9:45 and 10:45- more class same as 8:45 11:45- Lunch with the English teachers at school.
Sometimes early afternoon dictation drills with the kids or on one occasion, take over classes for a teacher who doesn’t show.
Lunch-6:00: Check and write on internet, bike around town, stopping at the local market we’d pass numerous times a day, read on our balcony or indoor hammock and on one occasion, teach Monks English at the nearby Wat.
6:00-7:00: Bike down to the Night Market, the evening gathering spot, for dinner and games of badminton.
9:00: Town is quiet, ride home while the packs of dogs collect to take over until sunrise.

Though 8500 miles from home for the holidays, we managed to bring Christmas with us with decorations and presents in our room, to calls and emails to friends and family home. From the beaches in early November, to Pai set near the jungle in the north, spending Thanksgiving in the hilltribe village and then this immersion experience in the Northeast most of December, we have had a spectacular visit to Thailand and feel we saw the country through a range of lenses.

Teaching at the Namsom Secondary School

Every Friday morning, the whole high school does aerobics together.We spent only one day teaching at the Primary School, because the rest of the two weeks was "Sports Day" where they had parades, festivals, races, etc. Very different then how we remembered our elementary schools!

We also taught monks one afternoon, helping with their English.

Sunset from the pagoda in Namsom- some 700 steps from town.

Dion offering food to the monks at 6:30am. Monks only eat once a day (before noon) and only food they have collected as they do here (someone at the monastery collects the various things and makes a meal for everyone).
Christy with her new friend Joy, who lives in town and family owns a clothing store by the night market. Joy is trying to move to NYC to become an au pair so they spent many afternoons working on her application, and English, to prepare.
These photos give a feel for the Namsom neighborhood. A temple surrounded by a "lake" was the center of town and across from the nightly market.

Eating Pad Thai at the night market

Badminton was the nightly event.

The night before one of the volunteers left, we had a dinner party with some of the Thai locals we had met.. this is our living room taken from the 2nd level, and without the usual hammocks
The hammocks helped make the house very comfortable.

Our Final Travel Route through Thailand & Cambodia