In this trip to Myanmar, COR has liaised with our host to help out in the A Linn Yaung nunnery school. The 4 tribes (Lacedaemon, Maya, Cairo, and Atlantis) were assigned different activities each day, namely: Village Interaction, Teaching and Construction!
Each day there will be a team sent into the village to interact with the locals there.
We were really excited to get a chance to walk through the village and interact with them!
Our gracious host, Allan kindly agreed to be our translator for the villagers. Thank you Allan!
As you can see above, their living quarters are really quaint and humble.
We were surprised and impressed that a simple room like that can sleep up to 5 people!
Once we settled down, we were greeted with hot tea and their local snacks (which contained various types of nut and salt) it tasted really good!
Fun fact, the picture above was of this boy's recent prize presentation in school for being top in class!
Also, you can see a towel on Kelvin's (left guy) leg, this was because we braved through a CRAZY thunderstorm (unimaginable craziness) just to get to this house, and when we finally arrived, the hosts immediately provided us with all the towels they had to dry ourselves up!!
A kind and heart-warming gesture indeed :)
The stories shared by them were really interesting!! Let me give you a snippet: See the boy in the picture, his parents waited for more than 10 years before getting married!! They met in university and events like his father getting jailed for joining a youth protest group against the military government set them apart.
Despite these obstacles, the mother decided to wait for him and they finally got together!
We were thinking... if this were to be in Singapore, the wife would have already gone on with another man!!
It wouldn't be a legitimate Burmese village interaction without the traditional Thanakha on our faces! Thanakha is a yellowish-white cosmetic paste made from ground bark that almost all Burmese put on their skin!
I must say, it was really cooling and refreshing when applied on our skin (especially on the face)!
After looking at how the villagers prepared the Thanakha, some of our volunteers also proceeded to grind the ground bark on the stone plate, along with a sprinkle of water, the Thanakha is then made!!
We made sure that the villagers felt the Singaporean warmth, not only by having a great time interacting, but also with a modest gift of a pack of rice! They were really thankful although it was just a simple gesture on our part!
At the end of the day, we were all smiles. I guess the most important thing that I have learnt from this village visit is to be appreciative of the roof above our heads and to really enjoy the simple pleasures in life! And also, TRUE LOVE DOES EXIST!!
Click here for more photos of our Village Interactions!
We had a slew of interesting lessons all planned out and each group took turns to carry out our lesson plans everyday! The following photos will showcase what we did throughout the few days in school!
First up, we had the LAVA LAMP experiment, where we showed the children how a makeshift lava lamp can be made. More importantly, we were trying to teach them the concept of density; higher density sinks, lower density floats! The children were highly mesmerised when we added the finishing touch (ENO salt) that creates effervescence and thus, the lava lamp effect!
Also, we got creative with the children with ICE CREAM STICKS. They had the freedom to create structures, as well as paintings from the ice cream sticks! I'm very sure the children enjoyed creating their own masterpiece from scratch along with our volunteers!
We also had one lesson on body parts and also oral care and hygiene. I must say the prop used to represent a mouth (made out of cardboard and egg cartons) was ingenious!!
The lesson depicted by the photo above was, to me, the most interesting one!! Albeit a little complexed, under the guidance of our volunteers, the children managed to build their own toy cars from bottle caps and ice cream sticks! Using a rubber band, we put tension in the wheels before letting it go. The children even had friendly races against each other's toy cars!
Last but not least, we also provided the children with legos and allowed them to build structures creatively. They had a blast creating their own structures and learning the concept of the importance of basic building blocks when constructing!
On the last day of our lessons, we also gave out toothbrushes kindly provided by our sponsor, Pearlie White!
Thank you Pearlie White!
After the few days of teaching, the children really enjoyed the lessons as well as the company of the volunteers and very quickly warmed up to us! Each of us volunteers definitely still remembers distinctly at least one student that made our day after teaching them for the few days!
Click here for more photos of us teaching in Myanmar!
For construction at the school, we continued from the efforts of previous volunteer groups
The construction in progress was for a proper flooring.
The following photos explains each phase of our 4-day. construction work!!
Firstly, we had to transfer excess mud and soil from the school grounds, to the area outside. Note that since the village was pretty rural, we couldn't have a digger there. Hence, every bucket of mud and soil were brought out using manual labour! Look at Eeva and Delia (left) digging out mud in the RAIN *their faces explains everything* and Zoey (right) lugging the bucket of heavy mud out.
After clearning the excess soil, we had to fill the ground with broken pieces of red bricks. And how did we break them? Yeap, manual labour! Since there was limited number of hammers to go around, some of us had to just throw the bricks against the ground. Some of us even said that this activity albeit arduous was pretty THERAPEUTIC?! (OK actually Sadrina said it)
Ft. Chairperson Sadrina (left) smashing into the ground with all her pent up angst and BizMag Kelvin and Deafy *and Superwoman* Ruhksana breaking bricks in the rain!
The last phase of construction was to fill the ground with fine sand. Again, there was no machin-help, and we had to transfer soil from outside. Hence, our group decided to form a human chain, that goes from shovelling to passing and lastly, to pouring!
When we ended our 4-days construction, a quarter of the school ground was filled and levelled with sand!
At the end of the day, I'm pretty sure majority of COR'17 would've felt that Construction was their favourite part of the service although it was the most tiring. It might be because we really had to work together, Deafy and COR members alike,
and the result was something tangible and visible!!
Click here for more photos of us doing construction in Myanmar!