An Afternoon in Ratchaburi

Yesterday night we returned from our excursion in Ratchaburi, where I had one of the highlights of my trip so far. We were fortunate enough to be able to visit the Tham Hin Border Police School, which is a K-6 school near the border of Thailand and Burma. It's called a police school because the area that the school serves can be unsafe, so police officers are trained to teach there so they can help keep the children safe. The children that the school caters to are generally not very well off, and 20 of them are actually from a Burmese refugee camp. But that didn't keep them from smiling from ear to ear during our whole visit. We were first given a presentation and a short tour of the tiny school, which was really interesting. I liked seeing the colorful kindergarten room, because there were pictures and numbers on the walls just like there were in my kindergarten class, but everything was in Thai.

Some pictures of fruits labeled on the wall of the kindergarten room. Note the difference between the fruits here and those from American classrooms.

There was a nice garden where the kids grow their own lunch food, and everything that they don't eat is sold in a local market to help raise money for the school. There was also a fish farm, a chicken coop and a place where they get trained to cut hair. After finishing this school they can move on to higher education, but the higher level schools are in cities that are pretty far from their homes, so they often don't get education after completing 6th grade. For that reason much of the police school's focus is to teach them skills that they can use on their local farms and in the town and such.

It was easy to tell these little boys were the trouble makers of the class, and they really loved having their picture taken. They are so cute!

After touring their school we were able to spend a little while hanging out with the kids during their snack time. I couldn't understand a word they were saying, and they couldn't understand anything I said, but we still had so much fun! I started taking pictures of them, and they thought my digital camera was the coolest thing they had ever seen. The fact that you could take the picture and then look at it again 2 seconds later was just fascinating to them. So I let them borrow it and I ended up getting a bunch of pictures of myself with my head cut out. It was so adorable, and I wanted to take them all home with me. But alas, after a little while we had to wave goodbye to all of their smiling faces and head back to the city life here in Bangkok.