Last year new SEEDS workers began a number of small projects focused on Sports and English teaching in southern Thailand. Over the last 6 – 8 months we have been teaching English and running sports programs in local communities, schools and government institutions. We are only at stage 2 of these projects and we desire to grow both projects, but there have been some very interesting developments.

The sports projects have flourished and we are starting new projects in different schools and communities. Local people are enjoying these types of projects, as they love sport- especially football. We are able to make an impact amongst young males, who are often vulnerable to drugs or crime, through value based coaching and mentoring. The English projects however have failed to grow the way we expected. We have lost SEEDS workers and the institutions have changed the dates of the teacher training courses. We were scheduled to begin two teaching training projects by May, but both of these have fallen through – we often hear the Thai phrase “mai pen rai krap”,(meaning-No worries/No problem) from the officials. This has been very disappointing but it is the nature of establishing new projects.

We did recently however run an English camp for a number of rural schools that are under-resourced. Seeing how the children enjoyed participating in the camp and learning new skills made it all worthwhile.