Progress independent of our day-to-day effort continues, this time back in Thailand with PDA.

We’ve been in touch with Laura, an intern from Michigan State who’s expanding the Barefoot MBA’s reach in Lamplaimat, where we piloted the first lessons. During her seven-week internship, Laura has been adapting and implementing several lessons with PDA.

She writes:

The first three weeks of the internship I was working out of the PDA Bangkok office, and just getting acquainted with the organization. I made a couple site visits up here to Issan to check out some VDP villages. For the second half of the internship though, Anita and I have been making the trek to Lamplaimat for the past couple of weeks, and working on adapting/translating 8 more modules. In most cases we’ve combined at least two modules together, creating a session that covers two related topics. Because you guys have already created the lesson outlines, the hardest part has just been coming up with activities that will keep the villagers involved and hold their attention. For one of the lessons I wrote a skit about loans and interests, and we’ve made up an activity about selling fruit in the market to teach about specialization. I’m still working on writing examples for the Planning and Records lesson. We’ve created some basic charts to show the villagers, and we want to be able to walk them through how to keep their records using them.

Laura is keeping a blog complete with photos and stories that harken back to our time in Thailand. We look forward to her regular updates — and, ultimately, to her final report.