July 23, 2008

"College all over again" except without any of you guys and only all the school work. That's kind of what I felt like after today :0. No, it wasn't bad. I was tutoring the kids as usual but one of them had like a thousand questions about circuits and waves that I wasn't quite sure about. So I looked in his book, which didn't really help because it was in Thai, and then I googled some concepts. Now I'm back in business baby and ready to offer more clarifications. Who would have thought that learning physics could be rewarding?

Anywho, tutoring hours is something I wanted to talk a little more about. I spend most of my day doing the office work and then I spend the evening tutoring. However I only get to tutor the kids for about 2 hours. Usually I get through 6 students; 8 if the the concepts take less time to explain. There are 36 students. I can't tutor longer because I can't actually stay on the site past hours. There are girls here and male volunteers are not allowed to be on site beyond 10PM. The regulation makes sense but I think it's an unfortunate situation. I have offered to tutor on weekends as well and as on my day off. Hopefully I can help more kids this way.

I wanted to end this post with my thought of the day which is actually not related to the topics above. I mentioned earlier that I'm taking the truck to work by myself now, which means I actually have more time to think. So I was thinking today (more like calculating). I take two trucks to work. One of them only costs 15 Baht a person and it goes from the marketplace to the next town which is about 17 miles away. There are usually 6-8 people per run which comes out to be 90-120 Baht that the driver collects. This is less than $4.oo. Gas here is 33 Baht a liter and 3.78 liters equals 1 gallon. 1 gallon would therefore cost $3.75. The pickup trucks here will run about 20 mph. Every run, they pocket a difference of only about $0.25. One truck makes 20 runs a day to and from the market place which means that they make about $5.00 per day driving. $5! How does one live off of $5 a day, especially with a family? That is my thought of the day.


Sadly I could take a picture of myself tutoring so I'm posting a picture of an other volunteer helping one of the girls in Thai. She's cool.