Yesterday I spent a peaceful day inside the Legacy Teacher’s House. It was a good thing I arrived in the morning because it was rainy nearly all day. As the power was out for about three hours (which required a call to the Electric Company, from which a nice fellow came to show me the fuse box in the building for future reference). I took advantage of the rain to browse the book collection of the Teacher’s House in peace.

As it happens, the Legacy Institute grounds are very poetic, with lots of shady trees and vines, water dripping down from the frequent rains, shady places to rest from the heat of the summer sunshine (so long as the mosquitoes are not eating you alive in the morning or evening). So, while it was raining, I found a nice quiet place to read after I browsed the miscellanceous collections of books.

As one would expect, a place like Legacy has a lot of books. The books are an interesting lot, collected over years from various teachers and collections. For example, there is a generous selection of booklets from Church of God groups, most of which are present in my own personal library as well ‘back home,’ as it were. There are some Bible translations and commentaries (including a very helpful three volume excerpt of the New Interpreter’s Bible, which is not that new but does have some very insightful commentary (I was examining their commentry on Philemon).

A second selection of works, which made up the majority of the material I could see, related to teaching in some fashion. There were curricula from previous instructors, dictionaries, including Thai-English ones, and even some TOEFL study guides for very ambitious students who wished to master the skills necessary to study at the university level. There was also a smattering of books about Thailand, including an older edition of the Lonely Planet Guide (I am a fond reader of their work, finding them very useful in West Africa when I visited Ghana, and now in Thailand as well), and a book about Angkor Wat, that magnificent Khmer ruin.

What I found most intriguing, though, from a personal standpoint, was the collection of novels from previous students who longed for some reminder of home. There was a nearly complete set of the Harry Potter novels in one bookshelf, and Christy, the Alchemist, and the Complete Novels of Jane Austen in another bookshelf (which certainly piqued my interest). It’s nice to know I won’t have to go without my Jane Austen fix even here.

After that examination I had the chance to look over the translations that Ati-Wat had made into Burmese from English from some previous presentations, and have them forwarded to my e-mail address as well, so that I can have some sort of “central record” of e-mails. At any rate, it was a moderately produtive day, though I wish I would have been less tired when I got home, as that led to an interesting complication.