Good morning teacher

David - 9th July

We were made to feel very special at the school and during the assembly, two of the Burmese students welcomed us in excellent English. One of them was a young girl not much older than Livvy who was very sweet and confident.
Gaynor, Imogen & Livvy said a few words of welcome. We were very proud of the girls to stand up and speak about the Campie-CDC link on front of so many people in such a different environment. Livvy said the link was very strong and important to the children at Campie.
After the assembly, we split into two groups to talk to individual classes of about 35-40 children - in very bare and basic classrooms with desks that looked like they were from the 1950s.

New teachers at CDC!

Seth & Imogen came with me to do slightly older children, probably around 10-14 and Gaynor, Maya & Livvy did the younger primary groups. Our Burmese is pretty limited, so Myoe Nyunt translated for us & another lovely man called Thay Thay Lin did so for Team Gaynor.
Over the next two hours and more, we spoke to six classes for about 20 minutes each. Each class greeted us by standing and in smiling unison, saying "Good Morning Teacher", which was quite strange.

Using some laminated photographs, which we passed around the children, Imogen told them a little about life in Campie School and the CDC link - one of the pictures showed the board at Campie with the pictures of CDC, Aung San Suu Kyi and a map of Burma & Thailand, which I always think are such oddly-shaped countries.

I talked about Say Hei and Thein Naing visiting us and about TN running into the cold sea and Say Hei putting stacks of chili sauce on all her food! We explained how the Cmpie kids loved e partnership and described done of the events we have held, like two ceilidhs which mixed Scottish dancing and Burmese food.

We said we had brought some small things from Campie - stickers, books, Scottish flags, letters from Campie children, etc - and hoped these would remind the CDC children of the partnership. We also showed them the origami Campie children made by Simon Archer which we hoped would remind the children of us when we had gone home.

We also explained a little about the money we had brought to help CDC - £1600 from the school's Rice Fund, £267 from the One World Night organised at Musselburgh Grammar by Maya and £167 from the Hits from the Musicals night featuring Imogen and her p7 pals Luke, Amy, Lara, Joy, Eve & Hannah.

I had also been told the kids at CDC liked football so Seth & I took some Musselburgh Youngstars strips along, and in each class invited the kids to try them on. In all of the morning classes, at least 7 or 8 children put the strips on and we took some pictures of em in the blue and black striped tops.

We asked the children taught us a few basic Burmese words and added to our limited collection with Ball-o (football), Nay gow la (How are you?) and Mama (older sister). This pleased Imogen very much, as Myoe Nyunt thought she was older than Seth!

The children were a little shy at asking questions, but there were some good ones - about how school was different at Campie and who did we have who was like Aung San Suu Kyi. That was a hard one! Seth said afterwards that maybe we should have said Alex Salmond - or maybe not!

Towards the end of the morning, Imogen & Seth started taking the mickey when I thanked the CDC children for making us all feel so welcome. I said that we also brought with us the smiles and love of the Campie children and would take the smiles and love of CDC back to Scotland. "You sound like a Disney film, dad," Seth & Immy said.