Workshop Wonders

By Lauren Donnison, Winter Legal Intern from the UK

During our first week as interns at BABSEACLE we did a week-long training program at the BABSEACLE house in Chiang Mai. This was conducted by the Laos team, Thip and Souliya, and the Vietnamese team, Ivy and Hien. On the first day we did a really fun scavenger hunt around the local neighborhood. This helped us to get to know the other members of our team, to find our way around, and learn to work as a team.

Ivy taught everyone the chicken dance, which she uses as her form of punishment for those who fail to do work on time. We had lectures about the different projects that BABSEACLE are running in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. These were very interesting and helped us all get a clearer picture of how BABSEACLE works across the region and how valuable our work as volunteers would be.

We did some really fun activities on lesson planning. We had to prepare a lesson plan in small groups and then teach one of the activities we had prepared to the rest of the class. This was very amusing and we all had lots of laughs. We learned some really useful skills and techniques that will be very helpful when we go out and do some community teaching.

We spent a day learning about editing, which was kind of dull, but we were convinced by Hien and Ivy that this training would be vital to our role as interns because we will spend time working on the Vietnam CLE manual – a very important manual that will hopefully be used for law students in Vietnamese universities.

It was a fun week and we learned a lot about BABSEACLE. We made some great friends and we were all really excited about the next 11 weeks ahead of us.