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I came to Thailand a year ago to work with Border Green Energy Team (BGET), a small Thai NGO focused on improving access to renewable energy along the Thailand-Burma border. Burma (Myanmar) has dealt with an on-going internal conflict for decades. Each year, thousands of refugees come to Thailand to escape persecution. Some are resettled to other countries like Australia or the United States, but most live out their lives in crowded refugee camps with little access to information or resources. In an effort to improve conditions for the refugees and ethnic minorities in the region, BGET develops local renewable energy and sustainability projects.

I had the opportunity to assist with varied renewable energy projects in rural areas. I spent time in a remote Karen hill tribe village installing a micro-hydro power system as part of a project with the UN Development Program. I assisted with the construction of a biogas digestor for the sustainable production of cooking gas at an orphanage hosting children marginalized by the conflict. I worked side-by-side on installation with students from the Mae La refugee camp. These students studied renewable energy as part of an engineering program taught partly by BGET for young refugees in the camp. Despite the obvious differences in our lifestyles, I was able to connect with these students and share a bit about my world as I experienced theirs.

These hands-on experiences taught me the value of introducing appropriate and sustainable technologies in rural areas. Making sure a technology can be sustained by the local community is critical to its long-term success. By involving community members in the planning and building process for each project, BGET is able to build and grow technical knowledge at the local level. I quickly realized that this type of sharing and spreading of technical information was not only beneficial to villages in Thailand, but could be used all over the world by NGOs and communities interested in sustainable development. This inspired me to develop a new BGET website and online knowledge base for sharing technical information, such as project reports, technical drawings, photos, system designs and field data.

The InterExchange Christianson Grant made it possible for me to live abroad and make a lasting contribution to my host organization. My experiences gave me an intimate understanding of the power sharing information has on improving livelihood. I learned that the world becomes a much smaller place with each connection I make. People and cultures are mixing, information is spreading and barriers are being broken simply by sharing with each other. It’s a beautiful thing to experience.

Living abroad had made me more conscious of my role as a global citizen. I understand that my actions at the local level have global impact. I’ve learned that life around the world is contextual and that understanding people and their environment is critical to successfully collaborating as a global community. Through these experiences, I’ve decided to make Thailand my home and I will continue to live and work here for the foreseeable future. Without the assistance of the Christianson Grant, none of this would have been possible!

Mae Sot is a border town: the western limit is bounded by the Moei River, which separates Thailand from neighboring Burma (Myanmar). There is the ironically named Friendship Bridge that joins Mae Sot and Myawaddy (the Burmese border town), although many people choose to float across the river in an inner tube because they do not have the paperwork permitting them to pass through immigration. Many people from Burma live and work in Mae Sot. Some only work here, crossing the border from Myawaddy every day as migrant laborers. Many of the Burmese immigrants in Mae Sot are of Karen ethnicity, a minority group from the eastern region of Burma that generally considers itself independent from Burma. All have come to find something that Burma could not offer them: jobs, safety, education. Many wish to return to Burma when conditions improve, others have made lives for themselves in Thailand, and still others await third-country resettlement to the US, Australia, and Europe.

But Mae Sot is still Thailand, and is inhabited by Thais who own shops and restaurants, run guest houses, and work for private companies as well as government positions. There are pad thai stands on every block and the occasional karaoke bar full of sex workers, for which Thailand is notorious. The Thai, Burmese, and Karen people all cram into Mae Sot, sprinkled with expat NGO workers, to create a unique city full of opportunity and challenges. It is as difficult to explain the situation in a few short paragraphs, as it was for me to understand when I arrived in Mae Sot.

One year ago, fresh out of graduate school, I joined Global Health Access Program (GHAP), a US-based NGO powered mostly by staff and volunteers in Mae Sot. At the time, I was very unfamiliar with the political situation in Burma, but I was compelled by the public health opportunities that GHAP would provide. With a stack of background reading in hand, I hopped on a plane to Thailand.

Read more about Katherine’s Volunteer work in Thailand.

InterExchange Working Abroad offers volunteer and English teaching programs in countries around the world.  Visit our website for current volunteer opportunities.

“For the first 4 weeks, I intensely studied Spanish 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. At times, the sheer amount of material I was learning was beyond daunting, but with focus and patience it began to get easier. I found I was making progress communicating more and more complicated ideas. During the weekends I took the time to explore the surrounding landscape on foot or by bicycle. I was so astonished at the incredible beauty of the volcanic landscape intermixed with corn fields and small towns. At times, I felt as if I had walked into a postcard: the stark beauty, the smiling people dressed in the most ornate colorful clothing, the corn-covered hills surrounding the bustling city where I lived. Quetzaltenagno, commonly called Xela (prenounced shela) is a city of about 250,000 people, over 50% of them K’iche Mayan. The city epitomizes the collision of old tradition and modernism. This was ever apparent with the many old Mayan women I saw dressed in traditional colorful handmade clothing jabbering away on cell phones in K’iche.  Xela lies in a mountain valley surrounded by towering volcanic peaks and ancient (and not so ancient) lava flows. At over 7,000 feet in the valley, the climate is quite mild, much like the Northwest of the US except that there are only two seasons, rainy and dry. I later learned that they call the highlands, where Xela is, the land of perpetual spring, and now I understand why. After four weeks at the school, I successfully “graduated” with an intermediate level certificate from the school. My Spanish still had a long way to go, but now I could at least barter in the market and get around the country without being unintentionally rude. My month of intense study was over and I was off again.

I have so many stories from this trip, each a rich experience that has impacted my life in countless ways. I am so amazed at the strength, perseverance, patience and optimism of the Guatemalan people even in the face of what was the most destructive rainy season of the last 60 years. Through it all, the people I met there have a joy for life that I think us Norte Americanos could learn from. I already miss the land of the Quetzal, but at the same time, I’m enjoying looking back at Guatemala through a different lens that comes from being home. I’m sure, like most other things in life, what this trip means to me now will change as the years pass by. But one thing is for sure, Guatemala has left its’ mark on my soul forever!”

Read more about Aaron’s volunteer projects in Guatemala on the InterExchange Foundation website.

The prospect of finding work that would make me want to get out of bed every morning compelled me to scour the internet for opportunities to go abroad and work with at-risk populations in third world countries. Given my fluency in Spanish, I was attracted to organizations in South America, and my quest ended with a volunteer position in Quito, Ecuador, which began in April 2009. With a hostel reservation and three suitcases, I embarked on the scariest journey of my life, relocating to South America with no return ticket. After navigating customs at the small international airport and collecting my bags, I was greeted by a tall British man in the midst of a crowd of smaller Ecuadorians. He was Casey, a colleague from CEMPROC, the organization I would be volunteering with. He bargained a cab fare to my hostel and, after handing me a stack of reading materials in Spanish and a map of the city at the entrance to the two-story building, left me to settle into my new home filled with tourists from across the world.

For the next three months, I stumbled through culture shock, found an apartment and roommate, investigated the struggles of the large population of Colombian refugees who have resettled in Quito, and became comfortable using the cheap public transportation system. CEMPROC had a hands off approach to their volunteer programs, letting me create and choose projects based on my interests. While this was daunting, it allowed me to shift my focus from the high school mediation training session I helped lead my first month there to working with the growing refugee community, an issue which had sprung to the forefront of the political agenda a year earlier.

Click here to read more about Emily’s volunteer program in Quito, Ecuador.

InterExchange Working Abroad is a non-profit organization that provides Americans with work abroad, volunteer abroad, English teaching and au pair opportunities in countries around the world.  For more information on working abroad grants available through the InterExchange Foundation, visit our website.

Yearning to immerse myself in the language and culture, I decided to volunteer in a rural hospital serving an indigent population. Speaking to professors, teachers and other acquaintances from my time in Beijing, I was introduced to Zhang Xiuyu, the charge nurse at the County Hospital of Yongtai, a rural hospital one hour outside of Fuzhou. However, despite my excitement and time spent planning a year abroad, as a graduating student I was unsuccessful at finding sources of funding. Thankfully, I found the Christianson Grant and was ecstatic when I learned that financial circumstances would not prevent me from being able to undertake a year of service in China. I am eternally indebted to the Interexchange Foundation for making this life altering experience possible. During the summer of 2009, after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Neurobiology, a minor in East Asian Studies, and a language citation in Mandarin Chinese, I left Los Angeles for Fuzhou.

Traveling to Yongtai County, I was overwhelmed by the glaring contrast between the relentless development of metropolises like Shanghai and Beijing and the poverty of the Chinese countryside. Despite having studied the equivalent of four years of Mandarin in college, arriving in Yongtai filled me with uncertainty. The countryside home overlooked rice fields and a flowing river. Along the river were forested mountains with altars built into the mountainside by local families to honor their ancestors. Chickens roamed the front porch and rice, cabbages, and other vegetables were cultivated in plots contiguous to scattered homes. My host father and his entire family had pooled their savings together to build a new house. The family had moved into the home two years prior from a very old and modest house adjacent to it, where my host father’s grandparents had first lived. The old, crumbling countryside homes were full of history. The walls were replete with fading slogans such as “Ten Thousand Years for Chairman Mao” and “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai,” a village in Shanxi Province which was held up as a model of collectivization during the Cultural Revolution. My host parents had met in the same rice fields during the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution. Universities and schools were closed down and urban youth were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants and become true revolutionaries. My host mother was sent from Shanghai to the countryside, where she met my host father, a young farmer at the time.

When I arrived at the County Hospital of Yongtai, patients and their families stared at me like I was an alien from another world. I often had a similar experience during my time teaching in Pinghu, where at one time a group of construction laborers simultaneously stopped working and intently stared at us laowai (foreigners) as we passed by. This did not happen in major cities like Beijing or Shanghai, but in rural areas like Yongtai people are still awestruck when they see a foreigner. Although I did not feel awkward by the attention, at first I feared my presence would prove a distraction to the patients and their caregivers. I shadowed Nurse Zhang around the medical walk-in clinic, helped with medical records, and escorted patients to their appointments.

Although I was able to communicate and understand basic ideas, perform simple tasks at the clinic, and learn by watching and shadowing, I felt that the language barrier was preventing me from learning in depth. It had taken over two years of intensive coursework to learn Mandarin Chinese, so I knew that even with complete immersion and focused study most of the year would go by before I felt competent in Fuzhouhua. I spoke to my host mother who contacted Dr. Weiya, a radiologist working at the Fuzhou Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital. Also known as the Fuzhou People’s Hospital, it is an affiliated teaching hospital of the Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I was thrilled by the possibility of interning in a foreign medical academic environment at a hospital dedicated to an alternative medical philosophy, which I would not have exposure to as a future student in an American allopathic medical school. A couple of weeks later, after receiving approval from the hospital administration, I returned to Fuzhou. I began my internship at the Fuzhou Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital shadowing Dr. Xiao, a leading pediatrician of Fujian Province who employs both Western and traditional Chinese medicine.

Read more on Gibran’s experiences volunteering in China.

Interested in becoming a Volunteer in China?  Visit the InterExchange Working Abroad website for Teaching English and other opportunities to volunteer or work abroad.

Read more about Julianne’s Volunteer work in Australia.

InterExchange Working Abroad offers volunteer, work abroad, English teaching and au pair programs around the world.  Visit our website for more information.

To read more about Jeff’s volunteer program in Uganda, click here.

Watch a video that Jeff made about the Kasiisi Project:

Read more of Sheila’s essay on her experiences as part of Working Abroad’s Teach English in Spain program.

Read more about Erica’s travels here.