School Status, Curry, Facepainting - PICS!

I know it's kind of difficult to understand (even for me) the details behind the status of the school. We are currently working on our school licensing, but in the meantime, we were partnering with another Christian school and were working offsite from them in an abandoned government building that we had permission to fix up and use for the year until we obtained our school license - at that time, we'd need to have a building that we could lease long term (which the government building wouldn't suffice). However, after just 3 months, the community leaders decided they didn't want our school in the building any longer and the short story is that we were forced out of that building. We started working on site at the other school and integrated all our students together. The other school (Mitrijit) is where our students are registered but they have a different approach to teaching than we do but all our students would take the same standardized tests. For the last month of this past term, we commuted to Mitrijit (about a 45 minute commute one way) and combined all our students. This week was the last week of the term. Our school is still seeking licensure in which our students could then be registered under our school. In the meantime, for term 2 (from now until March '10), we are required to continue to teach at Mitrijit (at least for now, things constantly change and nothing is written in stone :-). Because of our bi-lingual program and the advantage of teaching our students with smaller class sizes (our class sizes don't exceed 10 where as Mitrijit has over 30 kids in each class), we feel it's best to keep our children separate ad continue to run our program. The space is very limited and we are trying to think of creative ways to setup classrooms under a pavilion. While the situation isn't ideal, we have seen God working in so many ways. We found another building that we are renting and we have been fixing up.

Yesterday, we did a community outreach carnival for the students we teach as well as the community around us in order to build relationships. We are on "break" right now and will be able to take some time off but the rest of the time we will continue to build our curriculum and work on things for next term. Our plan is to be up and running as our own school starting in May '10. This is the reader's digest version and I hope it's helpful to let you know the latest info. Here are pics from the Outreach - we served Chicken Green Curry, had an air castle, face painted (that was my job for 2 and 1/2 hours straight and I loved every minute of it), and played all sorts of games.

The new school building

My job: facepainting.

Teacher's setting up games.



A lot of our students.


Spicy Chicken Green Curry . . . mmmmm.

Thai teachers - fun with noodles.

Spectators from the community.

Fun and games.

My friend and co-4th grade teacher . . . she's going to work at the preschool. I will miss her :-(.