Our school is connected to an organization (called HelpLive) that is working with poor children in northern Thailand who are in need of food, clothing, etc. We, as a school, are trying to raise some money to help this organization build a coffee stand. Selling coffee will allow HelpLive to become more independent; one cup of coffee will buy a meal for a child, and a bag of coffee will buy three meals (I think). So we've had a number of fundraisers recently to help raise that money. One of them was a Choir Concert - people bought tickets to attend this concert, and there was a presentation by a representative of Help Live to show what the organization is doing. (Click on the words "choir concert" to see some pictures of this event) It raised quite a bit of money! Another event that we've had recently was a baht-drive competition amongst the students. There were separate rules for the elementary grades and older grades; for the older grades, each class had a jar to put money into. Coins were worth positive points, and bills were worth negative points. I'm not sure how much money we raised from that, since we finished it on Friday, but hopefully there was a decent amount!
Something else that happened really recently was a high school girls' banquet - a first-time thing for us. The music teacher, Laura, and I got together before school even started and were talking about different events and things that happen during the school year. Both of us had been (separately) thinking about doing something for just the high school girls, and when Laura mentioned it out loud, I immediately jumped on board, and we started planning from there! So Laura and I, and two other teachers (Kristi and Bekah), planned a banquet for our students. It was last Friday night, and seemed to be a huge hit! A grand total of 15 girls came, and considering that there's only 19 girls in high school (10th-12th grade), that's a pretty good turnout! We had someone come and take some formal pictures for us, and I'm hoping to get some copies of those sometime in the relatively near future. We ate a spaghetti dinner (complete with salad, garlic bread, and brownies!), had some dancing, and talked about the topic of beauty. I'm not so sure how the discussion part of the night went, but I hope that some of the girls walked away from the night knowing that they are beautiful, inside and out, and that there are people around them who care enough to tell them so.
Another event recently was Spirit Week - we don't have any sports events for spirit week to lead up to, but we had one anyway just for fun. Below is a picture of my 12th graders on Under the Sea Day - no one really knew how to dress up for that one, so I had them draw pictures of fish during homeroom, cut them out, and paper clip them to their shirts for the whole day. They were nice enough to humor me, both for the making of the fish, and for getting a class picture:
Outside of these things, our lives have been pretty routine. We're really looking forward to our October break, during which we'll be going to a wedding (one of our fellow teachers is getting married), and visiting some friends of ours who live in Bangladesh! We're super excited, and will definitely update you about that trip!
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