Facilitating

1. I've officially been here a month!!

2. Since last time I've blogged, the my laptop fan has broken again. Without it I managed to write a pretty good paper about Buddhism and the king in Thailand.

3. Also, since the last time I've blogged I've been super busy with planning unit one facilitation! My team of unit facilitators (u'facs) and I have been working later and later every night planning sessions around the readings and homestays of unit one. (also the theme of unit one is food!)  Facilitation has been really challenging so far and I'm learning so much about how I work within a group leadership role.

Here is a picture of our first successful session, entitled RAD or Reading Activities Discussion. Look how focused and engaged everyone is! So much so that they don't notice Buddy being proud of our work! RAD is rad!

Yeah! Plan that debate!

I think a lot of the success of that first session was that this is the first unit, and the students are all ready for something different, and I think we're all ready to have the classes be student lead for once. But I think that everyone is generally into the topic of food. In the discussions that I saw and led, everyone was interested in and passionate about food issues. 

The big themes of this unit seem to be the issue of production of lots of food to feed billions of people vs. fixing the problem of distribution. The world produces enough food right now to feed everyone, but people are still hungry, because of disparities in class and country status. Also, interestingly, developing countries have a higher rate of organic farming than first world countries. Thailand, and especially the places we'll be going for our homestay, really value organic farming.

For the next 6 days we'll be mostly living in Yasothon province, where at least the villages we'll be in have completely shifted over to organic farming, and have organized a green market there as well. We'll also be talking to contract fish farmers and a village in Roi Et province called Ban Dong Dip that is currently switching to organic farming. I'm really excited to learn all I can from these villages, and put a face to the food issues that I've been interested in for years!