I have yet to tell you all about my assignment while I'm here! Besides learning everything I can about the good, bad and ugly of ushering people out of the sex trade, I will be creating a basic health curriculum! The students are educated in nine week terms. They take classes like computer, guitar, keyboard, English, Thai, media and communications, metal-working/jewelry making, sewing, parenting, etc. I will team up with the parenting class to teach my curriculum this term. I will create the course in a way in which it can easily be taught when I'm gone.
The parenting class is Monday mornings for an hour. I visited the class this past Monday for the first time. It looks like I will have about 15 students. At the end of Monday's class I asked them some questions about what they are interested in learning. I was excited to hear basic questions, all of them I have already planned to cover! So, thank you to my prayer team for the power of their prayer as I have been preparing appropriate lessons this past week!
This coming monday I will teach general health: staying clean, resting well, eating and drinking appropriately, prevention, etc. Throughout the term I plan to talk a lot on nutrition. That is the biggest problem I see now. Just like low socio-economic classes anywhere in the world, cheap, processed foods with no nutritional value seem to rule their menus. Most meals are developed from the 7/11! I will also teach about abortion complications, when to visit the doctor and how to take medicines, basic first aid, and pediatrics.
Most of these women have little available family and very little education, so they have limited knowledge on how to raise their kids from how to feed a baby to how to discipline a child. They seem eager to learn, but I imagine implementation will be more difficult than information gathering!
I am very excited to be of use and spreading knowledge that is so basic but I am so passionate about!
This is a fantastic posting. We like hearing about your assignment and goal. We wonder if you need resource materials to help you when forming your health curriculum? I bet john and Nancy Sue and Rory can help with that. Do you have access to printing? We could send pamphlets by email, then you could draw info from that, or reprint it with permission. Otherwise, maybe we could actually get our hands on 100 of each pamphlet and mail them to you for distribution in your class. They could double as an English lesson, or, perhaps you could have them reprinted in their language? Any of this sound needed? Dad
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