Marie LeafI almost feel disingenuous about my volunteer experience, as if my whole trip’s purpose was to answer the dreaded question: “So, how was your summer?” I keep my answer brief and superficial: “Great, yours?”
A month hardly seems sufficient for what I had set out to do. I volunteered at Baan Unrak Children’s Village, an orphanage in central Thailand on the border of Burma. There they house, feed, and educate refugee children from Burma and the surrounding area. Characteristic of any good international development studies student, I was full of enthusiasm to change a small part of the world.
Baan Unrak was hesitant to take on a volunteer for less than six months, but I didn’t understand why. After pleading with them for a summer spot, I was on a plane to Thailand. It was not the pretty ‘voluntourist’ picture painted in brochures. My living conditions were harsh, and supplies for my projects were non-existent. What’s more, the children I wanted to help seemed apathetic.
I taught English and computer skills, drafting grant proposals in my spare time for things all kids should have access to. I wanted to make every single failing thing better, make procedures more efficient, and set up better infrastructure and specialized computer programs. I found myself tirelessly teaching the older kids to expand their Internet skills beyond Youtubing Justin Bieber and Google Image searching Robert Pattinson. It was exhausting.
During English class, I had the children talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up. A surprising majority wanted to be tour guides, a very respectable job in Thailand. Others wanted to be policemen, “to put all the bad people in jail.” This answer made me uncomfortable, picturing all the violent ‘bad people’ in these kids’ lives. I asked if anyone wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. “Too much work, too much work,” they would say. The brightest student in the class told me she just wanted to be able to learn. They had completely different motivations than I did at that age.
But these children were happy. They had been through traumatizing experiences, yet had a startling calmness about them. Instead of driving home a certain idea of what kids needed to learn in high school, I started interacting with them and was surprised at what they wanted to learn. At first they could not sit still in class. They ran out the door the second the school bell rang. Then one day someone asked me about war—a topic they were all too familiar with. I started explaining the United Nations. Although the UN was an unknown concept to them, having no lectures to attend or newspapers to read, I was impressed by how quickly they understood issues of food supplies, human rights, and national security. Even with broken English, they couldn’t ask me enough questions, and everyone stayed in class through their lunch break with their eyes glued to me. I had broken through.
I gradually became attuned to Baan Unrak and found great joy in teaching the kids about things they were genuinely interested in. We swapped music, talked about life, and they were all eager to add me on Facebook. Although a month seemed like an unfairly short amount of time to be in these children’s lives, I hope I made an impact beyond a month’s worth of course material.
For more information about Baan Unrak visit http://www.baanunrak.org/. To order from their store, visit http://www.border-weaving.org
