For some weeks now in Thailand I’ve been teaching English to teenagers with a disability, many of them in wheelchairs and now we’re travelling, the senior classes, to Maechaem, high in the hills above Chiang Mai, to hold an English teach-in to Karen hill tribe students.

Karens are tribal people, mountain dwellers, with their own language and traditions but now, through a fairly comprehensive out-reach program from the Thai government, are gradually being brought into the national community.