The main goal of the mission is to give a basic education to hilltribe children who otherwise don't have the possibility to go to school. The biggest problem is that Thai government is not really willing to spend money to provide an education for those ethnic groups for several reasons. First, those minorities are not Thai and the government is somehow racist to finance teaching of a class of people that they consider lower than Thai. Then, for some geographical reasons, it is hard to build schools and maintain Thai teacher in some remote areas. Also, those hilltribes have their own language and they are generally not speaking Thai, from where comes the problem of teaching in Thai subjects like mathematics, Thai, physics, biology, etc ...
The mission gathers children from the remote area around Maesot (sometimes, kids come from more than 200 Km). The children can get here a basic education: learn Thai and then go to the Thai school to eventually integrate the Thai society. Pupils of the mission are extremely motivated in studying. It is sometimes amazing to see how dedicated they are when they keep on working on their homework until 1 AM. This is surely why the children of the mission get often the best results of the Tak district.

I didn't come to the mission to teach English at all. I only knew that the father needed some people to do some manual work in the mission. Anyway, the fact was that the current English teacher was going to leave soon and someone had to take over her job. The second day I arrived at the mission, I went to attend to an English class. Armelle (the teacher) showed me the basics of teaching and the next day I started to teach the Po Hä (Po 5) class. She kept on teaching the Po 6 class. Then the French scoutgirls came. And before Armelle left, Karine took over the Po 6 class that I later took for 1 month.

It was not so easy at first to teach English without speaking the language of the pupils. But I quickly learnt some basic words in Karen so that I could explain the English principles. Anyway, with a lot of miming and a good English-Thai dictionnary, it became easy and sometimes really funny to teach !

I used to give courses for about 3 or 4 hours a day: 2 hours in the morning with Po5 & Po6 class + an extra hour in the evening at the mission for exercices to both classes.

Also, few days after I arrived, two Karen-Burmese guys came to me and asked me to teach them English. They were used to work all day long for the father and were asking only for food and English courses. gave generally every day