Dear Friends and Family,

My heart leapt last November when one of my most amazing students requested that I accompany a group of students to Bangkok and be the necessary “adult” while volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. Call me crazy – and many did – but an important lesson that I had learned in departing from the United States is that while I adore visiting beautiful tourist sites, true adventure and the best memories are formed while meeting people. So in my student’s invite, I recognized an incomparable cultural experience – Korean students in Thailand, oh my! - not to mention a legitimate excuse to re-visit beloved Bangkok with the added bonus of volunteering for Habitat for Humanity – an international organization founded on the notion that everyone has “a right to decent housing.” I immediately acquiesced.

And I’ll tell you straight out: the trip was an incomparable experience – but not one that I’ll be in a hurry to repeat.

It was my amazing student, Yeji, who conceived of the good deed of volunteering, planned the trip and talked me into “supervising”. Our volunteer group, dubbed as the Youth Act for Peace team, was comprised of me, my friend Julie (also a teacher from the US), and 18 students – most of which I recognized but all of which I was still struggling for their names as we departed from Incheon to Bangkok.

Habitat for Humanity sent a staff coordinator and vans to greet us upon our late arrival in Bangkok and drove us to the hostel that we slept at – eight beds per room – yes, even me and Julie. The next morning we awoke, put on work clothes and embarked upon a week of sweat, hard work, meeting “real” Thais, and seeing the sites. Most mornings during our week stay, we were picked up at 9 am from our hostel, driven to the work site, worked from 10 – 1, had lunch (cooked by locals and served on tables at the local community center) + a bit of a rest, and then worked until finished for the day. Our first day was probably the hardest work-wise: just after meeting the family that we were volunteering to help, we stepped into too big rubber boots and pulled on knit work gloves in order to mix, with hoes, a pile of dirt with a few bags of powdered cement mix and a bunch of water and then haul the wet concrete mixture in buckets in order to lay the floor of the house the we were assisting with. This was hard, hot work that the students had predictable reactions to: some excitedly pitched in, some were afraid to get dirty, and some helped for as long as necessary before taking to the shade. At lunch, almost all collapsed on mats in the shade for a snooze and dragged back to the afternoon’s work. That evening, we ate dinner, had a group meeting, and slept heavily.

Things got somewhat easier in the following days and we took breaks from work and were tourists every evening. One day we visited the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, and Wat Pho. While another day we brought paper and colored pencils to an elementary school not far from where we were building and spent the morning playing with 100 or so adorable Thai kids. My students loved this! They performed a dance that they had learned in PE for the kids, gave away Korean memorabilia, and flopped right down to the floor to color and laugh and cuddle and play with the kids. As their teacher, I got the pleasure of being proud of my students while playing with my share of adorable elementary students. That was FUN!

But there were problems too. As “the adult”, I didn’t get breaks and I never stopped balancing the contradictory demands of wanting the students to have fun and grow while ensuring that they were safe. One evening while we were riding a water taxi up river, two of my students accidentally got off at the wrong stop. Heroically, Julie caught sight of this, got off with them and they found us. But that was scary. And then there were the times that the students ran late when meeting us at appointed spots – which caused me all sorts of panic (how would I explain their disappearance to their mothers???). And as the students were managing finances for the trip, there came inevitable points when I had to step in and work things through with them and Habitat for Humanity – which was decidedly not a pleasure (although all worked out in the end). As a final hoorah, the last day was amazingly challenging: 5 students were sick (i.e. fevers – I almost sent one to the hospital), one student ended up with concrete splashed in her eye (I had to wash it out with tear drops and make her cry), and on the way to the airport, Julie herself developed agonizing pain that we feared was internal but turned out to be an amazing muscle spasm.

In the end, although we were not able to finish building the house for the family that we were assisting, we enabled it (both with our time and with a mandatory donation), my students learned a lot (and mostly had a good time) while I too learned a lot about being an adult amongst teens, about being a leader. We all returned to Daegu, happily and safely – and can now reflect upon our trip with pleasure that increases with time, distance, and recovery.

With love,
Laura

PS: My apologies - I didn't talk a lot about Habitat for Humanity as an organization (they do amazing work!) but for more information about them and about the work they are doing in Thailand, check this article from their web site – not about us – but is still quite relevant.