Pesiba

We spent last week working at Pesiba deep in the city of Kuala Lumpur. We took the LRT and then took a long walk in the city, weaving through sleeping bums on the street and hundreds of Chinese shack restaurants with skinned ducks in their windows.
When we finally got to the office, we ran about three stories up the stairs and I got a mean bruise on my leg. Their railing ends are sharp! Who knew.

Unfortunately, when we came in, we saw.....teenagers. Upon more observation on our part, we found out that we would be teaching English to students OUR age. Not only that, this class had a huge variety in terms of age. It ranged from a young boy of 9 years old to a 25 years old married man. That was certainly something. We automatically knew that the curriculum we developed for the previous camps was not going to work for this certain group. Quickly, we had to improvise a brand new lesson plan. Lucky for us, Anna was there as well and gave us a few ideas of what to do. Since the group had a good foundation of English (they were already aware of basic vocabulary and sentence structure because they graduated high school) we decided to go through the 5 W's with them (who, when, why, what & where) and past vs present words (ran, run) until they were comfortable enough to proceed.

From that point on, I can't really remember exactly what we did but it was largely improvised. Because of the big difference in levels, one of us worked with the 9 years old boy while two of us worked with the older group. This part gave me a chance to work one-on-one with a young student which I did enjoy. By doing this, I was able to practice certain skills. Interestingly enough, this boy comes from a Deaf family and still had trouble expressing himself. Every time I spelled out a new vocabulary word for him to write down, he would have no problem. But when I asked him to repeat after me, he would just make up the spelling as if I didn't just spell it out two seconds ago. His motivation level wasn't too high which is the major problem of Deaf students here. They do try but then give up when it becomes too hard.

I decided to write down the vocabulary words on the board, use flashcards and so on. Then when I wanted to test him on word recognization, I decided to write each vocabulary word one by one and have him draw a picture next to it. For example, when I wrote down "pencil" he would draw a pencil. He did this with absolutely no problem but when I erased the word "pencil" he would struggle with the spelling and make up something.

But after a half hour, I was happy to see that he had learned and memorized about 7 of 15 vocabulary words. A success on my part.. and his, I would say.

The entire time I was there, I kept reciting this to myself: "Teaching is teaching nevertheless." Not the learning experience I wanted but a learning experience nevertheless :)

We frequent the IOI mall right around our apartment for dinners at night and to kill time by walking around food and clothes stores. Its about a fifteen minutes walk from our place and is a good spot for us. There are so many malls here! Muthu took us to Times Squares mall in Imbi and wow, I take back what I said about the mall inside the Twin Towers. Times Squares is huge. It has ten floors and is complete with a movie theater and Cosmo's World, an indoor amusement park.

We checked out Cosmo because we found out we would get in for only 10RM (about 4 dollars!! We often get discounts here, thanks to our disability). It is the largest indoor amusement park in Malaysia. After that, we went and got a fish massage! If you haven't heard of one, its when you go into a spa and put your feet inside a fish tank and allow hundreds of fish suck away at your feet (yes, even between your toes!) to clean off dead skin cells. It actually sounds much more disgusting than it really is. It just felt like bubbles against my feet.

We've used the city bus everyday for about a week now. It's pretty easy to get around especially using the monorail. Using public transportation used to be a pain for us because we would constantly get stares from people. Men especially would stare at us for as long as we stood there. At first, we would challenge them by staring back in hopes of making them feel uncomfortable enough to look away but nope. They stared anyway. So after three weeks here, we've reached a point of ignoring it-- sometimes to the point of not even noticing it! We sure are getting used to their culture.

Another yummy find for us! We love this Indian dish-- Tosai. Guess we traveled all the way to Malaysia to discover our love for Indian food ;) Certainly will be checking out Indian cusine when we get back to DC.

Monsoon season is starting! We went all the way to Gombak to check out Batu caves only to be bombarded with this ongoing rainstorm. But no amount of water will stop us! We're gonna go again today. Batu caves is a popular Hindu site surrounded with animals and a giant stairs made up of 257 steps! Am sure we're about to learn some more information later today.

Macaque monkeys, here we come! :)