Hello, this is AJ and welcome to the Effortless English show, the show that teaches you to speak English powerfully.

Recently, in fact, last month, I was on a two-month trip to Asia. So I was traveling through Nepal, Thailand, and Cambodia, and it was a fantastic trip.

Now, part of this trip was a volunteer experience.

For one week, I volunteered in villages, in the mountains in Thailand.

And I thought that the trip was going to be about nature and elephants.

That's what the description said when I signed up.

So Kristen and Joe from Learn Real English, my best friends, they also went.

So we all went on this trip.

We thought we were going to go to a couple villages and go hiking

with elephants through the jungle. And we did do that a little bit. However, what we didn't know

was that they also wanted us as volunteers to teach English to small children in the villages so of course

I'm an English teacher but I was on vacation and I really didn't want to do it and for

a few different reasons I think the main reason I didn't want to do it is I knew that they would

be using this kind of old methods that I was only going to be able to do it, you know, one short

class with these children. They didn't speak hardly any English. And I just knew it was a situation

where there was very little chance for success.

And sure enough, we go, and we go the first night and we go to this little school.

And each of the volunteers, we get a little group of kids.

And actually, Chris and Joe and I ended up with one group of kids.

They were about six or seven years old.

And no, they didn't really speak any English at all.

So we didn't really know what to do.

...