August 2010
2 posts
July 2010
14 posts
Three weeks from now I will be sitting in a natural thermal bath in Taipei, and four weeks from now I will be in Maine. Time flies.
We had a great second trip to Laos for Alec’s visa run. Laos is really different from Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam. What amazes me about Southeast Asia is hw strikingly different each country is despite the geographical proximity. Crossing the...
Week 9
I’ve now been here eight weeks, and time has just flown. I wrote a whole entry after this, but tumblr deleted the whole thing. I hate computers sometimes. I’ll try to recreate it later.
June 2010
21 posts
Kids
I’ve been reconnecting with my former students on facebook, which is fun and also slightly scary at times (they are so old!). I also just got a check from NYC public schools for back pay from TWO years ago and have been watching The Wire, which presents life in inner-city Baltimore. For some reason, this combination of events has gotten me thinking about teaching in urban schools and how...
Recently, I’ve been speaking to my friends at the office about their time as political prisoners in Burma. I so admire their amazing strength and courage. They risked everything in the name of democracy, and they are pillars of strength and courage.
The prison conditions they describe are brutal: constant beatings, torture, scarcity of food, lack of medical care. One described how guards...
Today marks three weeks in Thailand. Time flies. Not much is new— teaching an advanced English class about the law, which is very fun. Learning Burmese, which is challenging. My co-workers love to laugh when I say, “mingalaba” (hello), although they say my accent is good. Pretty funny considering I practiced my French with a group of French people on Saturday and they told me...
“For me, the decision was simple: No. We cannot expel Aung San Suu Kyi and others...”
– U Win Tin, a founder of the NLD, on the group’s decision not to participate in Burma’s upcoming elections. Full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/29/AR2010032901893.html?referrer=emailarticle.
Updates
It’s been a fun but uneventful week. I started work, and everyone is really nice. I am the only Westerner to work for the organization, so I feel like I have the rare opportunity to witness a really noble struggle for democracy in Burma. Many of the people I work with were formerly political prisoners in Rangoon at the Insein Prison (pronounced, unbelievably, “insane”), where Daw...
May 2010
5 posts
lisa in thailand
Hi friends,
I decided to bring back my blog so that you all can see what I’m seeing if you are interested. My arrival into Chiang Mai was easy, and since I’ve last flown China Air they have installed individual tv screens, which is a real plus on a long-haul flight. (Unlike last year, I was not subject to a group sing-along with Celine Dion’s concert video.)
There is...
March 2009
6 posts
“Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had...”
– Barack Obama, Dreams of My Father
February 2009
10 posts
