Ayutthaya Schoolday
Today we have a busy schedule. The “animal office” official will visit us, we want to make the area free of flees, and it’s the first day of the schoolprogram. Early at morning we go to the market by boat to buy little presents for the children and things for our schoolprogram. The night before we have gone over our program once more and we look forward to it! When we are preparing our quiz and are packing our gifts a schoolclass of toddlers all dressed in pink come walking to us. Lee immediately leads them to our stand, and they get sweets. They sing the chang-song, watch the elephants and attentively listen to Lee. A spontaneous elephantlesson in the field. After another exact one of such a toddler class, giving away more presents and singing songs we have a quick lunch. This wasn’t scheduled for today, but it has been a lot of fun.
We take all our stuff to the school which isn’t even 200 metres away from us. While we are still preparing, the children already come walking to us, all neatly in line. The Bring the Elephant HOME team is being introduced, the head of the school welcomes us, and the children start singing the elephant song. We have started.
When Lee is explaining the program to them, they all start yelling when they hear they will do an English quiz later on, and visit the elephants, exciting! Antoinette explains the goal of Bring the Elephant HOME, Hanna leads the interactive quiz and Lee sees to it everything goes according to plan, and interprets.
The children seem to love it and all join in. For their homework they are asked to make an elephantdrawing or other object of art. Tomorrow we will return to choose the best elephantartists. We will also give away scholarships then to six pupils. The school directors had thought it would be better to split the money we wanted to give into six instead of three, so even more pupils would benefit from it, which seems fine to us.
The scholarship students are sitting in the front row and one by one get an envelope and a t-shirt. It all looks quite official. After that it’s time to show the documentary about the Elephant Nature Park, give away note books, pens and then finally go outside. Getting their shoes on, line up into to rows and off to the elephants we are.
Lee introduces Silver Flower and Sri Nuan, and explains where they are coming from and where they are heading to. In the end we take another picture of all of us. We promise we will frame the photo and give it to the school.
It’s exactly 2:30pm when the program ends and both children and teachers with a smile on their faces return to their school. At the end of the schoolday some pupils come to bring bananas for the elephants and help feeding them leaves. We also have a lot of people visiting from the village. We play with the frisbee and stay with the elephants till it gets dark. The more people meeting the elephants and Bring the Elephant HOME the better!
