Volunteering at Baan Unrak

The first week of my trip I was volunteering at Baan Unrak school and children's home. This is the group that went. We are teachers from all over Japan, originally from all over the United States as well as a few from the UK. Here we are posing in front of the school sign.

The main thing that we did there was teach. I helped teach the 5th and 6th grade classes. This a picture with the 5th graders after our last class.

We also had plenty of play time with the kids both at the school and the home. The kids are starving for attention, and 18 volunteers at once gave them a chance to get it! Me with a few of the kids:

For the Christmas program, the kids performed a lot of dances and yoga shows, along with breakdancing and hip hop. We put on a Christmas skit since they don't celebrate Christmas to teach them about our holiday. I played Rudolph in the skit.

On Christmas morning, all the children got gifts - toys and clothing and school supplies. Some of it was new, but most of it was used donations for the children. But they were happy to get gifts and actually didn't want to play our "sports day" games because they were too busy playing with their toys.

We also helped out with environment day. A few of the volunteers from our group did a skit to promote doing your part to help the earth and then we all helped pick up trash.

Look forward to more pictures on flickr...I'm a bit tired and there are sooo many pictures from volunteering. The kids favorite toy of all is any volunteer's camera. They will snap shots ALL day long if you let them until your battery goes dead! Sorry, this was a really dry post without much excitement...I shall post more pics in the next few days, hopefully this satisfies a few picture cravings for you and let's you know I really was in Thailand at Christmas and wasn't just making it up haha!