Fly Away Butterfly

The students interrupted me during class to inform me that a butterfly had gotten caught in a spider web while I was teaching in one of the quasi-open-air classrooms. They coached me as I borrowed an umbrella and cheered when the butterfly flew away. That's really what I love about the school-- the respect for life. The only things that really get killed with a vengeance around here are the mosquitoes. This morning the cats followed me into the classroom and lounged on the students desks. Rather then kicking them off, they carefully placed their notebooks out of the way of the sleeping felines.

Butterflies were the bug of the week about two weeks ago, now it is ants. Ants is a decided step-down, but still an improvement over the previous weeks of the wasps and the termites before that. My favorite remains the few days of the fireflies where sometimes my room would be lit up so brightly by them that I could read in the dark.

Having a few low-key minor crisises. They are irrigating the rice paddies around the school and I am pretty sure that this is causing the water to get shut off from the school. We have large water tanks that hold about four or five days of water and they are getting pretty low. Fortunately it's also been really cool as we head into the real rainy season (what we had before was just practice) so one shower a day is adequate. In addition, we haven't had cell phone coverage in Nai Soi for about two days now. One of the students, Yoom, explained to me that this is because we've had rain for a few days and the cell signals can't get through the clouds. Since we don't have this problem in Seattle I am a bit skeptical of this technological explanation.

The student's language skills are quickly improving and I am trying to get more of a gist of their past histories. I've been focusing on the four boys from Lak Thai. They were here last year and either were, are, or will be Shan soldiers. (Hopefully this will be more clear when they finally nail down the different tenses.) I am just starting to learn about their situations. Tun, the kid with malaria, is a 19-year-old who apparently left his entire family in Burma and hasn't seen them in three years. The kids aren't terribly shy about talking about their families. Yee told me that his father died a year ago because he was old. When I asked him about it he started to laugh and another kid laughed with him, saying “he thinks it's funny that his father is dead”.

And the rains starts up again.