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October 2013

A new school-year

After an almost 5-month 'low season' in 'educational Luang Prabang due to the yearly recess in that time, Luang Prabang is gradually returning to 'normal'. This means that morning, noon and evening hours are 'traffic-mad' hours on the roads that cannot quite keep up with the growth of the town's population. Thousands of students who'd left Luang Prabang a 'ghost-town' for months, are now back in force with seemingly just as many newcomers, eager to start their pursuit of 'future' which lures in Luang Prabang. Although this turns Luang Prabang into a 'traffic-madhouse' at rush-hour times, it is part of this traffic that finds its way to the Mekong English Centre which partly accommodates the commuters and now finds itself with a similar 'mad-house' situation at its reception-desk where old and new students report for their classes after the recess.

Although we manage to be self-supporting, it is at this time that we are confronted with our financial 'limitations': during the recess we have been able to keep running our classes successfully and mostly to full capacity, but now with the new school-year, new students flock to the centre to register, only to be told to wait for a class to come available as all our classrooms are currently occupied. The influx of new students is something we could have prepared for properly if there had been financial resources to obtain larger premises to be able to accommodate these eager new youngsters. Now we have to make do with the situation as it is and work on possibilities to somehow make it happen in the future.

Such are the luxury problems of our English language centre on day one of a new school-year.

Sounds like a promising start...

Speaking of which...

In previous years our Friends in Holland, the foundation E.L.K. (English for Lao Kids) organised Christmas sales of Lao-made products of which profits were made available for sponsorships of students at MEC. Christmas seems to have arrived early in that respect as E.L.K. was present on a local 'summer-event', raising over 200 euros in the process. This basically means that 2 students are enabled to follow a course at MEC and study English 1 whole year each !!

A promising start indeed !!