Today was Orientation Day at Legacy Institute (classes here start on Monday), and it was a pretty busy morning. I spent much of the morning with Fran, our local Swiss cleaning expert (who lives close to the moat in Chiang Mai and was apparently kept up because of some religious event going on at one of the wats last night. Suffice it to say, I’m glad I don’t live next to a Buddhist temple.

Today my focus was on finding out what was necessary to keep a good routine of cleaning the school going, and I came out with a few very good suggestions. For some reason, despite the fact that I don’t really like cleaning all that much, I am somehow in charge of it because everyone else dislikes it more than I do, and however little I like it, I see that it needs to be done the right way. At any rate, between making sure that cleaning supplies are kept in the areas where they are used (and properly labeled so that we know where they should go if they are misplaced), and putting people in charge of areas and making them responsible for cleaning, I think we have a chance. I get the strong feeling I am going to be stuck over the guys’ dorms/restrooms (which aren’t clean very often nor do they stay clean for very long) because that is the most troublesome location. Plus, it gives me another reason to check the boys’ dorm thoroughly on a regular basis, which I consider very useful, as the boys have the hardest time with curfew as well.

After lunch came orientation. It was my responsibility to make enough copies of the Legacy Trainee Handbook for every student (the stapler wasn’t being very cooperative though), but as most of the students do not read or speak English very well (especially the first year students, who make up about half of the total), most of the copies ended up on the table afterwards. Overall, orientation went pretty quickly, though a couple of rules are going to cause some issues–for one, no one in the kitchen except for the kitchen crew, and no girls out alone at all, except on special permission from administration. It seemed that most of the young ladies understood the rules, though, and the reason why we don’t want them alone around the village.

After the rules were read out in English and translated into Thai, scheduled and uniforms were passed out to the students. Each student got their own personalized schedule showing where and when they had classes and with which achan. Then pictures were taken (I decided to wear one of my instructor shirts–the black one, rather than the dark purple one) for the class photo. After that it was time for relaxation, and later tonight I’ll copy some more tapes for the Burmese work and work on another class worth of lecture notes, hopefully.