My first teaching day

I have finally started teaching today! I've met two of my three daily classes so far. One is the class in the picture. They are intermediate English speakers so it was fairly easy to have a conversation. They are smart young men and have interesting stories to tell. We spent the lesson telling the story of each of our lives and having others ask questions. This helped us to come up with a list of topics for future classes. Among our next topics will be using a map of Tibet to learn about cities, towns, river, etc., the philosophy of Buddhism and ONE of the students is studying painting pictures on cloth at the temple. We might even take a "field trip" there to see his work.

My other class today was at the small monastery at the other end of town. The monks there speak almost no English but were very earnest and eager to learn. Our first class was learning to introduce ourselves and say a bit about where we're from and where we live. (Most of them have come from Tibet and are living in India to escape the Chinese government's unjust rule of their land their people.

I will have to name these pictures for you as my latest idea for putting captions on each when I took them from my camera to My Pictures did NOT work. Next time, I will upload one pic at a time and give a blurb about it, not rambling on and on about something else and leaving you confused. My apologies for this cyber-challenged blogger's brain!

Starting from top: Children during morning exercises; My intermediate conversation class of very smart students and another English teacher; construction vehicles (these mules are walked to work each morning right under my guest house window; construction site in town (check out the sandals, bamboo poles to hold up the roof and no hard hats!); the view from the town after this morning's rain (breathtaking, eh?).

Hope you're enjoying these posts and pics. If anyone can clue me in on how to caption pictures as I go, I'd love to be "in the know." Till we meet again...Tashi Delek!