A letter from Scott and Khanita Satterfield in Thailand
November 24, 2008
Dear Friends,
The Loy Krathong Festival has come and gone, and soon will come the King's Birthday and Christmas. Loy Krathong, which initiates the change in season leading towards Christmas, is a festival of light and water having its origins in ancient times. It is a time to stop and pay respect to the spiritual world, to ask forgiveness of wrongs done and start anew. Rivers are busy with processions of scented joss sticks, candles and flowers floating on banana leaves or bamboo stalks carrying away the prayers and hopes of those who set them in the water. In the north, the sky is lit with floating lanterns. Night takes on a beautiful, alien glow, as if the stars were rising from the earth and taking their place in the heavens.
The year began with an abrupt change in plans. Because of the rising cost of living and cost of fuel (gas prices averaged nearly $1.00 more per gallon than the U.S. average price), budgets became tight and everyone in the office was told to put travel plans on hold. So, we weren't able to visit schools as we had planned. Undaunted, we addressed the needs we could. Khanita and I expanded the types of materials in the English Resource Center to include student readers, and we created a journal in easy-to-understand language that would provide teachers with ideas, techniques, lesson plans, and free Web sites for their teaching. The first issue of our “Journal of Teaching English” focused on activities to be used with the student readers. (Teachers complain they have no materials for reading.) Our goal has been to provide reading materials to schools and to help children become interested in reading books, whether in English or Thai. Thailand has a 96 percent literacy rate, but surveys have found that most people read very little, and students mostly read for study purposes. The books were a success, with many schools ordering them and using the ideas from the journal.
Following up with this is a new reading project to support poor schools unable to purchase books for their library collections. When we visit a school we spend time in its library, and we often find that most collections are gived. Not much is purchased by the school, and most of these collections don’t support study or provide suitable, interesting reading. So we have initiated a new project to set up an English book corner in a school's library. With books we can purchase here, but mostly with books gived to the Education Ministry, we will begin to set up a corner in two schools this school year, and more in the next. We will purchase special shelving and displays and bring these along with the books to a school, work with the English teachers and the librarian to set up the corner, and train the teachers on how to use it. They will be able to use it as a teaching tool and a tool to expose children to reading. Our prayer is that out of this will grow an understanding of the need to improve school libraries.
Our biggest project has been hosting the Minnesota-Thai Teacher Exchange Program last June to hold several teacher training workshops for the English teachers in the church schools. This was the second year for these workshops, and the response was great. Out of 25 schools in our network, 24 sent teachers, some taking two and a half days to travel to Chiang Mai in order to attend! This is a big response, as typically 15 to 17 schools send teachers. The program is organized by Dr. Ruth Lysne, who coordinates with the College of Education of Minnesota State University and with Minnesota public schools to provide university lectures and classroom teachers to come to Thailand to give workshops for our schools and for public schools in Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Since our schools are in different provinces, this allows them to help places they could never have time to visit. And the lectures expose teachers from the countryside to experienced teachers and trainers, giving them the kind of professional development they would otherwise never have the opportunity to receive. We are happy to help the schools with this kind of project, and we greatly appreciate what Ruth and the teams of teachers she brings are able to give to the church schools.
I am drafting a new curriculum to help teachers build vocabulary, grammar, and reading and writing skills in their students. For most Thai students, the main college and job skills involved with English are speaking, followed by reading and writing. Schools do a good job with the former, but the latter two skills suffer, mostly due to poorly designed curriculum and materials. We hope to change that. With fuel prices going down (when will other prices follow?) we will be able to travel soon, and we plan to hold workshops at some of the smaller schools where teachers need more intensive training. In June 2009 we will host our friends from Minnesota for the third time. Our prayers are with you. We are so grateful for your prayers and support.
Scott and Khanita Satterfield
The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 92
