A visit with Michel and Kelsy at New American Pathways

It's Thursday.  I'm wondering if anybody, anywhere, has any idea what they are doing.  And if such a people exist, is there any possibility that I will ever meet them, or recognize them if I should meet them.  Or is the world just one giant lunatic asylum.

About 3 years ago I volunteered at Refugee Family Services.   They fixed me up with a Burmese woman named Teal who wanted someone to come to her apartment and help her with English.  I went over there weekly for several years. I became fond of her children, her son Wesley, now 5, and her daughter Ashley, now 3.   A year ago Teal passed her Citizenship test.  About that time her brother Thang Peng and his wife Moi Moi got refugee status and came to the USA.  I stopped working with Teal, who didn't really need me anymore and started working with Thang. I have been doing that for the last year.

There is not much support for volunteer ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers.  I took some classes, but didn't learn much.  I started looking at ESL videos on youtube and found some that were very useful as teaching aids.

There are thousands of ESL videos on youtube.  Most of them aren't very good but some of them are great.  The big problem is sorting through all of them and finding the good ones and then classifying them by degree of difficulty.

I built a web site to organize the ESL videos.  I added other things that would be useful to refugees, so they could go to one page and have links to a bunch of stuff that would be helpful.