Helping A Monk With His Homework

I ran into Wolle again (he came on the speedboat with me) and along with Johanna from Austria, we visited the Phou Si Buddhist temple on top of the hill. This temple is fairly impressive and affords the best views of the city of Luang Prabang. They have multiple Buddha statues -- one for each day of the week. There is also a giant Buddha footprint in the rock. And there is a fortune telling Buddha too. I explained the procedure to Wolle and Johanna and they both got a fortune. The procedure is as follows:

1. put a donation in the box
2. pray 3 times - once for Buddha, once for yourself, once for the teachings of Buddha.
3. take the can filled with wooden sticks and shake it gently while tilting it.
after a while one of the sticks will fall out or stick out farther than the rest.
4. pick up that stick a look at the number written on it. then walk over to the fortune board and pick up the slip of paper with that number written on it.

However the fortunes are written in Laos so I told them to find a local to translate for them.

On the way back we stopped to chat with a couple of Monk Novices (student Monks). There are hundreds of Monks and Novices in Luang Prabang all wearing the bright orange robes. One of them was working on a homework assignment from school (the one on the left in the picture). The assignment was to write a short essay in English about some embarrassing incident that had happened in your life, and answer some questions about it. He clearly knew many English words but he was having trouble constructing grammatically correct sentences and understanding some of the questions. So I helped him write the essay and complete the assignment. In return he translated the fortunes for us, and everyone was happy!