Ban Don Sawan

Open Mind Projects was our home base and family in Isaan for 3 weeks. The students and staff have been so warm and welcoming to our family and we have made some really special connections with the Laos students who fully embraced us with warm smiles, hugs and their fun sense of humor. We were there to provide motivation and opportunity for the Laos students to get English language conversation practice through sharing and participating in daily life tasks together.

The daily routine was very casual but there was usually time between 9.30-11.30am to learn some new vocabulary using fun games learning apps like Kahoot and Quiz lit, or to work on the garden development project or tourism projects they had going. This was followed by a big communal lunch session between 11.30-1.30 where everyone helped to prepare the daily lunch banquets of amazingly varied and delicious local dishes from both Laos and Isaan. The meals were always a delicious perfectly balanced combination of spicy, sweet, acid and salty flavors and it was really nice to cook together and chat, have a laugh and learn some new techniques in the very basic but efficient kitchen. Every meal was centered around a huge basket of sticky rice which we have not been able to find in other parts of Asia and we now crave every day. The sticky rice is grown and supplied by TT’s family and it is the staple food for Isaan people, where the farmers work long and hard and rely on the slow releasing energy in the sticky rice to keep them going all day. These routine lunch banquets where a highlight of our day, after which we would cycle down a few blocks to our favourite iced coffee cart to sit in from of the fan and order our regular yen cafe and na manaw. That’s iced coffee for us and fresh lemonade for the kids. From 1.30-3pm there was another learning session where we would help the students work on their projects. The afternoons were so hot and we were always lazy after the feast so not so much was achieved during this time. 3pm was Mala time. The students run a BBQ cart outside OPM and all money raised from the BBQ was used to supply all the food for the center. Chloe loved this time of the day when she could help Ty prepare and sell the food. Olivia always helped at the DJ station they had set up and Jacob was the best BBQ customer. It was a fun time where they had the music pumping on the street, delicious food cooking and a special Sichuan spice rub that we are also now addicted to.

We also had the opportunity to go to English club at the Monk University each Wednesday afternoon to give the novice monks an opportunity to practice their English language skills and also to go to a very poorly resourced local primary school to help teach English but that didn’t go too well as we didn’t know what we were doing.Read more