June 25th

June 25th -

Today is our last day in the village. Having already exhausted our work at the school site, we moved onto a single day project of planting trees. Were we working in a village area around a temple. Before we started work, we said a few word about the importance of trees, not only to this area, but also to a larger worldwide awareness about humanity's impact on the environment. This sentiment was restated by the abbot of the temple, who probably had a greater impression on the boy and girl scouts and the villagers who had volunteered to work.

Like other environmental day projects I have participated in, this one required us to clear the area of plants before introducing new ones. I am used to clearing non-native species. Here we were removing shrub and brush that was unable to stop the erosion of the river bank. In its place, we planted fruit trees more able to the task, and capable of providing additional nourishment to the people.

Once again, our intentions were confounded by our lack of supplies. With the large amount of people, the work was being accomplished with alacrity. It was mesmerizing to watch orange-robed monks hack away at the tropical shrubbery. Tools to clear and dig were passed from one person to another. After a few hours, we ran out of area to plant trees. We traveled to another plot, but this area was already cleared so the planting required even less time. Nonetheless, with so many people working at once, it was easy to feel accomplished looking across the areas of planted trees, even if each person only completed a small fraction of that job.

When there was no more work to complete, we said our goodbyes and headed off to visit an orphanage. Thinking back, I am not sure that I had ever been to an orphanage before. From my sampling of one, I can say that they are both wonderful and frustrating places to go.

This one was particularly well-run. A neo-humanist woman from Italy had dedicated the last twenty years of her life to orphaned children, mostly immigrants from Burma. The orphanage held 400 children, most of whom had den-mothers that looked after the children in exchange for food, training in their sewing center, and education in Thai and English language classes. The orphanage had a weak playground, but a great sports field. There were orchards of fruit and an animal center. However, the animals were only keep as companions and as reminders of humanity's interaction with nature. Everyone adhered to a strict vegetarian diet. Additionally, they were building a new meditation center. Why an orphanage would need a meditation center, but I assume it is for the neo-humanist who come here to see the work being done.

To add to all the wonderful work being done, the children looked exceptionally happy. Most people could not resist their laughter and calls to play. As we were being toured around the facility, the children already home from school tagged along. Some were being carried by group members. One exceptionally strong volunteer even tried to carry two seven year old children.

However, I restrained from this, which is part of the frustration of visiting an orphanage. Children look for attention and affection from whatever sources are available. These children were getting a glimmer of this from their den mother and the director, who has been a mother to probably over a thousand children. However, the immediateness of these children onto our arms or shoulders or backs speaks to the need for more personal attention. To give them that attention and then walk out of their lives seemed exceptionally difficult, not just for their fragile knowledge of loving guardians, but for my own beliefs about the sanctity of such things.

Everyone expressed their happiness at being able to visit. The next morning we returned to make some purchases at their store. After visiting sweatshops and places with weak labor standards, it was a relief to be able to buy items that were made in a fair and equitable manner. I bought two ten dollar shirts and a thirty-dollar blanket. Quite expensive for Thai prices, but all the money was going back into the orphanage's operations. Plus, the blanket is amazingly soft, and I have gone to the extent of dubbing it “the orphan blanket.” I even look forward to returning to truly cold climates for the chance to curl up in this blanket.

For me, the orphanage visit helped center the activities that we had been doing for the past two weeks. We came, we did work, and in the end we probably helped some people and did some work that otherwise might not have taken place. However, the work and projects and work was incomplete. Along the same vein, we came to the orphanage, we played with some children and we learned. Likely, the most helpful thing we did was shop extensively in their shop. Still, the help was not complete.

This is the lesson that I take most fully from my volunteer work in Thailand. The work accomplished is necessary, but incomplete. By work, I mean the active participation in the process of development and individual empowerment. I believe this means being an active learner in the world around you, becoming a more ethical consumer and producer, and, on occasion, donating your time and/or wealth. None of these things are ever fulfilled completely, which is discouraging and refreshing at the same time. The thing I will cherish from this experience is the knowledge that the completeness of the work is not as important as its continuation.

June 24th

June 24th – Having exhausted our supplies a day ahead of schedule, the group leaders had come up with the idea of us teaching the Thai/Burmese elementary school students. Everyone seemed quite excited about the idea and in the evening people were clamoring for more time to prepare lessons. Everyone except me, I suppose.

I am not a confident teacher. I don't mind giving speeches; they are set and defined, and generally well-preped. I don't mind tutoring either; there is regular interaction and quality interaction with only a few students. My lack of confidence in teaching large groups comes in part because of my desire for learning to be fun, or at least not boring. I consider myself lucky because I find many forms of learning enjoyable. However, I know that many students are not lucky in this way.

Many of the other participants were coming up with elaborate lesson plans. Meanwhile, my partner, Laura, and I were considering math. Math is the international language after all. With only forty-five minutes to teach it seemed easier than anything that would involve translation. Plus, there are some fun math games, like “around the world.” (I take that back. “Around the world” is a terrible math game if you don't like math. I must have liked it because I was good at it.)

The first class we taught was a group of third graders. We began by introducing ourselves and then continued by asking a few students to tell us their name. Bad move. Those kids clammed up fast, and it was obvious that singling students to speak up was not going to be well received. Scratching ten minutes off of our mental lesson plan, we moved on to the rest of our sketchy plan which consisted mostly of math and a little bit about expressions and conversational English.

We went through numbers in English, which the students knew readily up to ten and less readily up to twenty. Using that range of integers, I wrote math problems upon the blackboard and we asked students to volunteer the answers. Like a vanishing act, their quick recitation of Arabic numeral is English disappeared.

I have heard that it is near impossible for people to perform mathematic calculations in anything other than their mother-tongue. From the faces of the students, it was clear that they had no problem with the calculations. The questions involved nothing more complex than a multiplication sign and they could say the answer in Thai. The problem was in translating to English.

In an attempt to keep things entertaining (and educational), we moved on to conversational English. However, our conversation plan had no interaction component, so it ended up being the two of us talking in what was probably incomprehensible American English. Then we tried expressions of the question “How are you?” This was also dismal due to our terrible visual aid of crappy chalk face drawings.

Exhausting our lesson plan with speed, we defaulted to a song we were hearing a few doors down, “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes.” The song was entertaining, but I couldn't think of anything except how horribly this lesson was going.

I thought about every substitute teacher that my former classmates had torn to shreds. That air of frightfulness and inexperience that make substitute teachers so ripe for sacrifice, we were perspiring it in buckets. A few more minutes of this and we would lose all semblance of being teachers.

In my own panic, I suggested we go back to math problems. This time instead of asking students to answer verbally, we would just ask the students to write the answer. It wasn't teaching, but it was easy and somewhat entertaining. Plus, it allowed us to regain the attention of the class.

Then Laura, my partner in inexperience, came up with a brilliant idea of letting students choose the victims of our math problems. Using an orange as a “hot potato” students quickly moved the fruit from desk to desk hoping not to be the one holding it when we called out “stop.” The game turned out to be quite entertaining and the last ten minutes flew by.

All in all, that first class was excruciatingly painful in its lack of preparedness, but each successive class became easier. We quickly learned that oranges lasted only a few minutes before becoming inedible and unusable. We also let the students start to write the next problem after answering a question.

We weren't even trying to teach new material. We were simply monitoring a game.

We watched as a class of first graders tried to outdo one another by making supposedly hard addition problems with more and more zeros trailing the leading digit. Students giggled and laughed. They shrieked when the “hot potato” landed on their desk, and furtively tried to pass it on to another student.

I doubt that they learned much new for the forty-five minutes that we took over their classrooms. Still, they had fun and I had fun, and maybe for some students that is not something that happens frequently.

June 23rd – Today we returned to the worksite. In my mind, I was still working out some of the things we saw on the previous day's excursions.

Over the weekend, the principal and the village head-man were also doing some work. They had called on community members for assistance on the project. Sixty people showed up and complete twice the amount of concrete that we laid.

In addition to paying to come out to Thailand we were also financing half of the project. Unfortunately the supplies for the other half of the project – the half that was to be completed after we left – were not yet available. Thus, we found ourselves running out of materials faster than anticipated.

By about two o'clock, we were finishing off the last of the concrete and were taking a break under a tree. A new member had joined our group on Friday. A very beautiful Thai woman named Sue was volunteering with us as a form of personal vacation. With her seamless English, she was taking over as a translator and guide.

Despite working with the regular laborers for several days, this was our first opportunity to ask and receive questions. We got to find out that many of them had been doing this sort of work for many years. They didn't own most of the tools they were using. In this case the school owned the tools, including the cement mixer. Perhaps most interesting was that the young workers although they had dropped out of high school had enrolled in trade schools. After hearing many stories of relative despair, it was encouraging to hear about the non-traditional school opportunities for these men.

However, the nicest thing said that day was that the laborers actually enjoyed working with us. In fact, they enjoyed working with us over the villagers from the weekend. When we asked why, they said it was because we were always smiling, we went to work with such energy, and we didn't complain or bicker (unlike some aforementioned people).

For most of our work time, I had assumed that at best we were a harmless nuisance to the laborer's regular schedule. After all, we took most of the cues through hand gestures and we frequently ran into one another and made other small mistakes. Meanwhile, they seemed to work without obvious error. Yet, here we were hearing that we were actually welcomed as a presence and uplifted their spirits.

With any volunteer work, it is difficult to measure the benefit achieved. That is especially true with this particular project. However, the good achieved from goodwill is something that can have ripples of impact for generations.

June 22nd - Part 3

June 22nd part 3 – To add to the day of thought provocation, our last visit was to a brothel. When we arrived, there was only one friendly aspect: the ebullient girls. The brothel was housed in a U-shape with an open concrete courtyard. The individual rooms were cinder-block shells. When I took a moment to peak inside all I saw was a dirt-speckled bed without furnishings, unless you count a mosquito net.

The tone was especially somber. For me, it felt a bit like I was a Nazi-sympathizer meeting with a group of Holocaust survivors. Looking at the faces of the other males in the group, it looked like the shame expression of awkwardness and shame. We were the default enemy in a vicious battle of the sexes.

The prostitutes looked at ease and were giggling among themselves. They appeared to have built defense mechanisms long ago. To break some of the obvious tension felt by males and females alike, we played a game in a circle of throwing a tomato in the air from one person to the next. If dropped, we had to start from the beginning again. It was a good trust exercise and everyone laughed when I missed my catch. After playing the game again with an egg, the mood seemed more congenial. Nonetheless, group members lost no time in asking some very probing questions.

The first question asked was how old were the girls. It seems like an innocuous question, but it received some fairly reserved answers. Down the line answers from 19 to 24 appeared, most of which seemed plausible with a margin of error of 2 years. In the middle of the semicircle sat a very young girl. Her face seemed to lack the depression and sullenness that the other girls wore behind their false happiness. She smiled, looking to the other girls for an answer. At first it sounded like she tried to say 17, but changed her answer to 15. When we left the brothel, the general consensus was that she was closer to 12 or 13, no older than 14. Throughout the entire conversation, it was difficult to avoid staring into this young girl's face. It was captivatingly sad to imagine the life that forced these circumstances.

Around the table again, the girls answered that they were all doing this as a means to make money to send back home. When asked how much money they would need before leaving, they answered about 10,000 baht (300 USD), which would take four to five months to save. When asked how long they had been there already answers varied from one month to five. One fresh-faced girl, who was quite popular with clients, had been there only 15 days. When someone asked if the ones who had been there for several months would be heading home soon, the idea was not immediately jumped upon. “Yes,” a couple said reluctantly, perhaps based on the fear that the families they hadn't seen or spoken with would not accept them when they returned.

There were many more questions asked. Given that they went through two translations, English to Thai then Thai to Karen or Mon and back, it was about an hour and a half of questions. However, when the time came for the prostitutes to ask questions to us there was a void of interest. One of the older girls, who had acted as a spokeswoman for the group, asked if there were people in America who did what they did. Somewhat matter-of-fact we said “yes” without much explanation of contrast. Later the group would discuss how the statement we made was very dream crushing. There's was a question of hope; “Is there anywhere in the world where such unpleasant things do not exist?” Our answer reflected a harsh reality, “No, nowhere.”

Perhaps a lie would have been better. A lie to maintain hope.

As we ready to leave, the faces of the other guys in the group looked like mine: depressed from everything spoken and unspoken, weary from the general tone of distaste toward me, but overall relief from a place that was awkward and unsettling for us all to be around. However, before we could leave the women wanted to take pictures with all of us, pictures that kept dissolving into smaller groups and different permutations of people.

It added an additional layer of bizarreness to the entire day. None of the other migrant workers were interested in having much to do with us, but these women were very enthused about these pictures. I would like to think that they wanted us to take a part of them with us, away from this place.

The opposite side of the relief of walking out is the pain of empathy in knowing that none of the prostitutes get the same luxury. While we get to go back to comfortable beds and friendly surroundings to hash over all the days events, the women stay to see the few clients that gathered to lounge in the courtyard during our discussion.

There is a responsibility bestowed when you hear and see stories like the ones we hear. The challenge is knowing what to do with it.

Detemined to finish - June 22nd Part 2

I am writing from Cambodia. There are a number of stories to tell from my experience here. However, I am determine to finish writing about my volunteer experience in Thailand. The part I left off from is that my group is just leaving from the Elephant Festival and heading to Three Pagoda's Pass. So enjoy June 22nd - Part 2

June 22nd part two – It was probably quite beneficial that we proceeded to the next part of the schedule with elation. After a serpentine drive around parts of Burma, we arrived at Three Pagodas Pass. Three Pagodas Pass is the place where Burmese armies crossed into Thailand to sack the capital city of the day. Thailand followed suit years later to attack Burma. After many minor conflicts, both sides decided to construct a peace symbol on the border in the hope that no more wars would be fought.

The foundation we work with has an office in the border town to assist with language classes, disease prevention, and immigrant resources for individuals crossing from Burma to Thailand. The official border is very exact and ornate with signs and guards indicating their allegiance to their particular side. However, due to some recent flare-up, and in spite of food and construction aid for cyclone relief, the border has been closed since March. A few hundred meters away, an unofficial border exists with soldiers again as guards, but here collecting tolls from individuals passing to and from in the hope of temporary work and money to send back home. We were asked not to take pictures here, a request that was unheeded.

Our first visit was to a shoe factory. Here the workers were finished for the day, or the boss told them that they were finished for the day. Around the table sat about twenty individuals, mostly women, ranging from 17-24. However, a few looked more like 15 and one said that he was twelve. We asked questions about how much they make, where they come from, and how long they work for. For the most part, they come from a few days travel away and work a contract period of a few months, making about 5-6 dollars a day.

We continued asking questions around what they hope for, what they want to do in the future, and what they would like to change. The worker's boss stood over the table to monitor the answers of his employees. As a result, the answers were marked with brevity and conciliation. For example, a question about what kind of breaks workers receive resulted in the kind of standardized answer that would make someone from in charge of US labor standards smile.

Overall, the conversation lacked in verbal information, but told in non-verbal communication. Every worker's face expressed a tiredness and desperation at the situation. Questions about what they wanted to do in the future resulted in answers like go back home when they earned enough money. Perhaps most telling was when we asked if they had any questions for us they said no, except for one woman in the back who asked if any one of us would trade places with her. There was some awkward laughter from the workers and us, but looking at the faces around, it was obvious that no one wanted or could fully imagine trading places with this woman.

I left with the group with a profound sense of helplessness and shared responsibility. No matter how good the capitalist system seems, there are always immense trade-offs and inefficiencies. I was so shaken up that by the time we arrive at the second warehouse operation, I was trying to defend the migrant worker system. I was still trying to convince myself that these people wanted these jobs and the opportunities of money that Thailand provides, but their home country cannot.

But I couldn't excuse the things in front of my eyes of squalid, damp buildings packed with sewing machines. Here, low hanging curtains hide the beds along the walls where workers sleep after their shifts. Since the workers don't speak Thai, it may be reasonable to conclude that they never leave until they earn however much money they need for their families. As the workers focus on their machines, a few children pass a ball to each other as they pass the time. For them, there seems to be no school, just waiting. The hardest part of me is the realization that our demand for cheap goods manufactured under any conditions is what brings about these situations. Additionally difficult, is that there is no easy solution to the conundrum.