Six Weeks of a New Life

  A week ago Sunday, I moved into a new building in a new village (this one within Vientiane's city limits, if there are such marked boundaries to the city) just down the street from my new job at ARDA Language Center.  
   I am still teaching English as I was at Nita School, but in a whole new way: with small classes and lots of resources/materials/support and with a need to relearn lesson planning and teacher-student interaction.  I have two classes, each 1.5 hours five days a week.  My morning class is a beginner's english class with two (!) pre-teen girls and in the evening I teach eight adults in an advanced business writing class.  It is fun to be able to know my student's names, to play games in the morning class, and to converse with my evening class.  It is tiring to be designing worthy lessons and then to teach then and to follow up, but I'm happy to have discovered that I do, in fact, like teaching.
  I am still living with Lao people but my new housemates are Lao young people who are studying at ARDA's Skills Center (the men study electricity and the women study housekeeping; when they graduate they are prepared to find work in these fields-- not anyone's dream jobs, perhaps, but stable employment with relatively good pay).  We have separate dorm rooms and share a common kitchen and living area.  We share meals when we are around at the same time and there are occasional group bike rides or puzzles 
or ping pong games.  
   Many fellow volunteers are going home for the summer, so I'm also in the midst of saying good-byes just as I say all these hellos to new students and co-teachers.  It's a balancing act that I haven't quite perfected, so I'm slightly off-balance (perhaps I am perpetually so).  But the last five weeks of my time here looks to be full of hope and new adventures to build on the old.
Peace,
Renee