Returned Youth Exchange Student
Ingrid gave a spirited presentation to the club on her year away, commencing with greetings spoken in Thai. She returned home on January 12, after staying at Nonthaburi, the most densely city outside Bangkok, population 1.25 m people.
Her goals for the year were language, friends, school. She quickly learned new goals to change negative school attitude towards YEP, and the lack of a welcome - and succeeded. They accepted another YEP while she was there. Another goal was to change stereotypes re Australians.
Ingrid had 3 host families. She had many opportunities to travel with the families, to both southern and northern provinces. Ingrid said the food was amazing – her weight gain was due to sticky rice pudding and mango. Her parents visited for a week after she had been there for 7 months. Her favourite place was Chiang Mai.
She attended the Suakularb Wittayalai Nonthaburi School, which had 6,000 students, and was the top school in the province. There were 50 in her class, and there were 20x year 12 classes. School was from 7 am – 4.30 pm with 1 hour lunch break. It was an easy going school system but she noted that teachers miss more class than students.
Ingrid found the written language very hard to learn- 46 consonants, 22 vowels. There are 5 tones, which can change meanings, and Ingrid took 8 months to learn speech. She picked up the language best when the family only spoke Thai. She volunteered to teach English for both primary and secondary students; welcomed visitors; opened a sports carnival; became confident in standing before a crowd and speaking and performed a Thai dance in front of school students. The annual teachers’ day is very special – pay respect to teachers.
Her Thai Rotary Club did a lot of volunteer work e.g. food parcels for flood victims which Ingrid assisted with. The Rotary Club was small and not very active. They held very serious, long meetings with a lot of arguing over money.
The school sports carnival had little actual sport, with the parade being the focus. Ingrid was Queen of the carnival. While in Thailand she also met the Australian Ambassador.
Ingrid thanked the Club effusively for offering her the opportunity to have the most wonderful year abroad. She will be studying primary school teaching at ECU in Perth, commencing in February.
Lloyd thanked Ingrid for her presentation, saying she was a wonderful ambassador for Australia, she embraced all the opportunities, and was a shining example of the value of Rotary’s YEP.
