My fantastic Laos staff has been busy.

Our Facebook page has exploded in pictures and videos taken by Khamxay and Santi during the courses we 3 teachers hold: Afiju (Village chiefs, college students), Amos (college students, young adults) and myself (elementary and junior high).

Take a look! You can see us in action.

https://www.facebook.com/suntisouklvc

Due to the Center’s location, rather hidden down a narrow alleyway, and a 2-year hiatus due to Covid, getting back on track has been hard. The previous director, Angie, did her best but things just weren’t picking up until my arrival.

I have now added a junior high class of 6

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And my elementary school students have increased from 4 to 7.

Director Duties: So Busy!

My director duties have led me down some interesting pathways. Mostly, Center repair and clean-up. We have had very limited funding and this has allowed the Center to become somewhat of a safety hazard, not only for the staff but our students as well.

My list of woes are as follows: The roof is leaking (rain has a moldy hole formed above my office desk), plumbing problems (dripping faucets, unusable toilets, broken pipes), electrical issues (we almost had a fire in the larger room assembly hall – sparks flew from the ceiling lights!) and numerous other things.  The electrician came and we are in the process of having all 8 classrooms, office spaces and assembly hall  taken care of.  Next will be plumbing and then the big project of the roof.

A Productive Clean-out

         The staff and I spent an entire day, in nearly 100 degree weather, cleaning out the storage room.  Broken computers, legless chairs, cords and wires, rusted machinery items,  stacks of wet papers, glass panels without frames, huge wooden boards, hundreds of tools and mechanical shop items.

I learned that 4 years ago, the Center was in another location and had tried to create a mechanic’s repair course for motorcycles and small engines. A huge amount of money was used but the course was a failure, due to few students and not a proper garage-type set-up to teach such vocational skills. When the Center moved to the current location, all those items were transported to where we are now and the stuff shoved into a tiny room (along with everything else) where it had remained, untouched, all this time. Not on my watch!

As director, I made an executive decision to empty out the room, keep the expensive equipment (of which there was a lot) to sell and all the broken things would be hauled off to the landfill, most likely.

Here is our lovely storage room now.

That clean-out included lunch on me at a local restaurant and a final exhausting sit-down to fresh mango dropped from our courtyard tree.

What a relief for me when the salvage guy came yesterday, looked over the outer courtyard things we lined up, offered us a price and off it all went.   We received $50 for the steel items. More money for the Center!

Hallelujah!

And on that last note, I’ll close this off, wildly waving my palm branches high and with great joy in honor of our Palm Sunday tomorrow.

From Laos, signing off with a grateful heart.