pattaya beach "cleanup"

A couple of weeks ago the school decided to embark on yet another one of those strange, poorly planned, last minute endeavors which inevitably end up in confusion and discomfort. The idea this time was to have a "cleanup day" where we unleash hundreds of our delinquent students on a rocky ocean side area in Pattaya to collect rubbish for a day. what could possibly go wrong?

Pattaya City

As is almost always the case here, the other American teachers and I were essentially clueless as to the itinerary for the trip and what it was we were expected to be doing for the 9 or so hours we spent with the kids that day. The bus ride there lasted for two long, loud hours. Busloads of children tumbled out into the midmorning heat and immediately scattered.. we wandered around for much of the day watching kids lifting pieces of glass, food wrappers and splintery boards riddled with rusty nails up onto the shore. Leaving the 100s of kids running around willy nilly, precariously teetering on slippery rocks, and generally getting up to no good, teacher Katie and I stole away to Starbucks and got ourselves iced coffees and used their nice clean bathrooms.

a failing attempt at taking a group photo

At the end of the day prizes were awarded to groups of students who collected the most garbage. unfortunately, this was measured by weight so "most" garbage meant "heaviest" garbage and we had kids hauling up bags of rocks, coconuts and wet rope, the more ambitious ones dragging concrete benches and whole boats (i kid not) up from the shore.

weigh station

Above are wash buckets of hot, filthy water for the children to rinse off their hands before eating. For lunch, the kids got boxes of sticky rice and fried chicken to eat with the hands they had just moments before been picking up old milk cartons, dirty tissues, animal bones, with. We all sat on the ground by the parking lot to eat our boxed lunches (teachers got muu krapow, one of my favorite dishes) and wait for some sort of cue as to what to do next. I ended up finding some of my students who were able to communicate that it was time to leave..

a cheeky grade 5 boy taking advantage of the opportunity to stop working and pose for the camera

high school students loiter on motorbikes

watching, transfixed, as the grade 6 girls slip and slide
over sharp rocks in their flip flops

grade 5 boys trying to wrestle a toilet bowl out from under boulders and logs
- pattaya city in the background