CCT Volunteer Mark Cotter Art Relief International - Compassion, Understanding, and Awareness

                               

Chiang Mai, Thailand. The mountains surround the city in serenity, combing with the 

cloudy skies to create a soft, calm scene. Everywhere you walk, everywhere you look, 

there are food stands representing the communal Thai society as customers and 

sellers exchange food, money, and happiness. The Old City is reminiscent of the 

Lanna Kingdom, a past and glorious empire with Chiang Mai as its capital. As the 

moat surrounds this part, you can still watch Lanna dance performances and enjoy 

traditional Lanna cuisine. However, the best part of my trip, more than the food, the 

mountains, and the past, are the people. Through my internship, I have been exposed 

to the various communities Chiang Mai offers and they are often undeserved.

 

In a two-week span, I have worked with adults with disabilities, children with disabilities, Burmese refugees, students at temple schools, juveniles, elderly, and male sex workers. Art Relief International has bestowed upon me the opportunity to create and present art workshops to these marginalized communities. From teaching the students English words and drawing their favorite food on a plate, to forging charmed bracelets for the children with disabilities and dancing to the beats they made.

dance performances and enjoy traditional Lanna cuisine. However, the best 

part of my trip, more than the food, the mountains, and the past, are the 

people. Through my internship, I have been exposed to the various 

communities Chiang Mai offers and they are often undeserved

 



These communities are full of love, joy, determination, and grit. Yes, they are undeserved and marginalized, but they are as capable of succeeding as everyone else when given equitable opportunities. My compassion, awareness, and understanding has substantially grown in these past couple of weeks, and I hope to continue that for the rest of my internship.

CCT Volunteer Sarena Sanchez's Blog Post temple School Wat Kuang Singha

A week and a half ago I started my internship at Wat Khuang Sing School where I am teaching English to students. While my time there has not been long, I have experienced many different things. I am teaching English to students 1^st through 3^rd grade and have learned so much in such a short amount of time. The Thai school that I am placed at is extremely different than any school I have seen in the United States. The students are very orderly and polite and the school has a schedule that even includes time for the children to brush their teeth after lunch! There are no bells that indicate when classes are over or starting, but at certain times of the day specific songs play that signal that it is time for either an activity such as lunch, or time to concentrate while returning back to the classroom setting after play time.

Some challenges that I have faced so far include learning how to manage a classroom full of children, lesson planning strategies, and my teacher being out of town for the first three weeks of my internship. As for learning how to manage the classroom, I was able to reach out to friends who have previously taught young children. Specifically a friend who taught English in Korea, where she did not speak their language was extremely helpful. She gave me tips on non-verbal signals and other techniques that made a huge difference in my classes! One thing that definitely made me nervous at the start of my internship was the idea of lesson planning. I do not have any previous experience with creating my own lesson plans and was struggling with what to do. Once I had a better grasp on the information that the children already knew, it became a bit easier to manage. My lesson planning could still use much improvement though and I will continue to work on it! Lastly, when I started my first few days at the school, I learned that my co-teacher would be going out of town for three weeks, leaving me to teach my classes on my own and also take on a majority of hers to teach on my own as well. At first that was extremely intimidating, as I was not used to leading a classroom on my own, but it eventually grew to be a blessing in disguise. I believe that running these classes on my own has given me the opportunity to create a stronger connection with the students, as I am who they go to when they have a question even though we may not understand each other’s languages fully. I will be excited to have my fellow teacher return, but I am grateful that I was able to learn so much from being on my own.

One of the most interesting things that has happened at my school so far is that last Friday the students put on a market in the morning! Each grade had foods to sell. Some of those were popcorn, omelets, fried banana and fried mushrooms. They also sold books, toys and trinkets to other students. I spoke to one of the other teachers who told us that the market happens once a month and is helpful because not only does is build a community among the students and teachers (who also help and participate), but it gives the students invaluable life lessons. It gives them the opportunity to see what running a business is like and lets them practice skills such as counting and money handling. I thought that this was such a great idea and would love to see something like this happen at schools back home!

CCT volunteer Anna Osborn's Blog Post, Forest Restoration Research Unit (FORRU)

As a student studying environmental policy and environmental sustainability, I was very eager to start working for FORRU. I came to Thailand to work at this internship and gain hands on experience in the world of environmental sustainability. After a little over 2 weeks, I am very satisfied. We began the internship at full speed. During our first week we spent everyday out in the field except for one day. Although the field work is often tough manual labor, I personally love it. I love the mix of office work and field work. It’s extremely nice not having to sit in an office indoors all day, plus I get to see a lot of the nature in Thailand which I enjoy. One of the days I was able to help at an education event where we educated other American college students on forest restoration. After we took them on an adventurous hike through the mountains that was actually pretty tough! The rest of the week was spent preparing for our big planting day. We spent two days raking and removing pine needles and other invasive plant species to prepare to plant the trees at planting day. This was hard (but fun) work! It was so satisfying to see the progress we did with removing all the toxic plant species.

                                           

 

         All the preparation lead to our big planting day which was last Saturday. I had no idea how popular this event was. There were hundreds of volunteers that came out and helped us plant over 2,000 trees. There were different plots with different species of trees planted in various plantations across the mountain. The goal is to see which tree grows best in which area which will help restore the forest from degrading and slash and burn. I haven’t studied forest restoration so this is very new and exciting to me. It’s also really cool to learn about it in a foreign country with a climate much different than my own. However, even though it’s a different area of the world, this method could be introduced to America forest restoration as well.

 

    Away from the actual work, I have the best co-workers. There’s about 6 other interns, some are Thai students from a university in southern Thailand. They are so much fun and so welcoming to me even though there is a language barrier. It’s fun because they will practice their English with me and I’ll practice my Thai on them. We’ll ask each other what certain words mean in the opposite language. These girls make work so enjoyable. My supervisors are awesome too. They are so laid back and really down to Earth. It makes coming to work fun and not feel like a chore. I am so thankful I am able to spend the summer working at a job I enjoy, where coming to work is desirable, and where my coworkers are considered friends. I’m really thankful for FORRU and cannot wait to see where the rest of summer goes with this job!

CCT volunteer Nora Demilta Blog Post Art Relief International

It is crazy how much time has already passed. I am more done with my summer adventure than not. It’s frightening to think about returning home and it’s making me want to savor my time here. This past week of workshops brought unique challenges and victories that I did not originally expect. I am still learning the dynamic of this team and discovering how we all fit together. Regardless, I’m thankful for the group I am working with. We support each other in and out of the workshops and are always ready for fun.

            I taught my first workshop last Monday with Thai Freedom House. We made pinwheels and boxes for them to be displayed in. When we came up the stairs the kids were running around, shouting, and throwing a ball around the room. I was anxious to begin. I had no idea how I would be able to communicate what I needed from them and how I would be able to lead their group. Luckily, Pepo handled most of the explanation and fielded any questions the children had. I felt so guilty whenever I was unable to assist one of the students properly. I would look blankly at the students as they asked me questions in their native language. Only fully responding when they called out, “Teacher!” As my time progresses I would like to do my best to communicate more with the students. I know that I’m not going to become a Thai wizard overnight but I think it’s important for our relationship to figure out a multitude of ways to communicate. There’s more than just verbal communication and I will have to use that to my advantage while I’m here.

           

  I love my placement and I am so thankful for the chance to be here. The more time I spend with ARI the more I feel connected to what I value as an artist. All of the groups we work with are so unique and it makes every day a new adventure. 

CCT Volunteer Kyra DiFrancesco Blog Post FORRU placement

These past few weeks have had their ups and downs. At FORRU, we alternate between office days and field trips. So far, I like to go on the field trips more than I like to stay at the office, although for the field trips we have to get up very early. On field trips, we tend to plots (raking leaves, prepping for planting, etc.), have planting days, or transport seedlings from nurseries to planting sites. In the future, I hope my fellow TEAN interns and myself can participate in more science-based field trips. For example, FORRU also has to do monitoring, GPS tracking, set up camera traps, and test pH levels in the soil.

On office days, we are either stuck in meetings or just doing data entry. The meetings are interesting but they can be very long. For data entry we are copying field notebooks from the 1990s into Excel. This doesn’t feel like very important work nor is it of immediate necessity. However, the past two days we got to stamp tags for seedlings for our next planting day. It was fun to work with my hands. Over the next few days, I’m definitely going to start asking for more responsibilities, whether from my supervisor or from the head of FORRU. Right now I’m a little apprehensive we are being treated like typical interns.

In addition to stamping tags for the seedlings, some other highlights of the past few weeks include our first field trip, in which we helped teach a group of American students about FORRU, and our big planting day on 24 June. We did a lot of work leading up to that day, and it was great to finally see the trees being planted. I had never planted a tree before, so to think that I planted a baby tree that could live for decades and help restore the forest is really exciting!

CCT Volunteer Duncan Brody Blog Post Temple School Wat Thong Gai

   I guessed before coming to Thailand that the story of this trip would be ‘not knowing anything and just going for it’. It turns out I was very right about that. Even the day just before my internship began I knew close to 0% of what I needed. All of the interns woke up on that 4^th Monday (1^st Internship Monday) and drove to the Arts Relief International house. From there, the twelve of us received our general orientation. Luckily, the teachers had a second day of orientation to accomplish a more specific understanding. Our orientation/group leader notified the three of us (ESL Teachers) that our internship was particularly challenging, and that it would require a significant level of resilience and preparation. Since we’re teaching multiple classes of varying age and ability levels everyday our lesson planning needs to be differentiated as well.

    You appreciate the work that goes into being a teacher rather quickly when you’re thrown in to the mix without any warning. I approached my first day of teaching without a knowledge of what speaking/reading/writing level any of the students were at, what my schedule would be, how many students I would have/what their names would be, where my school was or how I would get there. So, when day 1 rolled around I figured it all out the hard way. Here are the answers to all the questions that burned in my head leading up to the start of my work: I teach solo for 6 classrooms ranging in age from 7 to 15 (1^st to 6^th grade). Each class has around twenty students. I teach 2 to 3 of these classes each day (2 on Tue. and Thurs. because I study Thai at the University and miss the morning class block). Mondays are definitely the hardest because I teach grades 1, 2, and 3 all on the same day. The ability level varies from knowing basic conversations/directions/animals etc. to knowing close to no English (this includes letters and numbers). Telling these students what to do is nearly impossible. To get to work I take a twenty-five minute Uber each way every day. This is kind of a blessing in disguise because it gives me the opportunity to meet and have interesting 20 minute conversations with ten different people during my commute each week. I need to spend about 1-2 hours a night working on lesson plans, materials, or doing research of some kind to help improve the classroom.

     These logistics don’t even come close to giving an accurate picture of what my day looks like, however. When you line up the responsibilities and stresses in a list you wonder why you would ever do a job like this, but the reality is something you couldn’t replace with the world. Although I spend the majority of my day hearing little kids (and teachers) spouting out Thai words, one on top of the other, that I simply don’t comprehend, I have met some of the most colorful personalities I have ever known in my short two weeks at the school. The teachers seem to be obsessed with having an American teacher as a ‘play-thing’ to test their English on and tell jokes around, and the kids treat me like we’ve been best friends since birth. Although I give the 1^st – 2^nd graders a lot of flack for being difficult classes that are uncontrollable, the kids have the hugest hearts and are too darn cute to not love. My favorite class is the fifth graders, however. They are such a smart group, and they are all incredibly dedicated to learning and growing together. I’ve never seen such a special group of kids who care so much about their education.

    Something that I realized on my first day on the job is that you can learn more about a culture by witnessing one full day of school than from spending three weeks taking classes at University. As I walked around the school yard and saw the way that the children learn, spend their free time, perform standard daily rituals, and react to their peers and teachers, I became so acutely aware of what that means for the society they live in as a whole. School is where so much of your childhood is spent. These are the years that form the foundation for the rest of your life, and over half of the waking hours of everyday are spent here, learning your values and your desires. That is why I think that teachers are some of the most important people in the world to shaping what children grow to become.

CCT volunteer Sam Walters (Art Relief International)

We did a lot of things during our first two weeks volunteering at Art Relief International. The first week seemed more stress free since all the workshops were run by Madeline. It was still a lot of work but really exciting to meet all of the groups, seeing them smile and having fun. The second week was a little scary, because we were writing lesson plans but fortunately I am part of a very great team. We all helped each other out because nothing is more important than creating a great workshop where everyone has fun and learns something new. I am glad that I get to work with such great people that help me when I need it and I can help when they need it. We make a great team and we all are so happy to be working for ARI. I am very happy to have met everyone at Hope Home, Urban Light, Elderly Care, etc. It always makes me so Happy to see them.

CCT Volunteer Julia Taladay Blog Post (Art Relief International)

Since starting my internship with ARI only 2.5 weeks ago, I feel like my understanding of so many different things have changed. The people I’ve gotten to meet and work with have made me realize that I can be an extremely adaptable and relaxed person, while also being a leader that people look up to. Before starting the internship, I did not think that I would work well with disabled people at all. Being an athlete, most of my friends are also athletes and we often bond over physical activities like sports or competitions. For children who are physically disables, I was unsure if I would be able to make a connection with them. At Hope Home and Healing Families, I proved myself wrong. I have learned new ways to bod with people through different avenues. I am learning how to communicate and bond with others in a way that in still physical, like helping the kids paint and giving them different fabrics to feel, but in a way that is less competitive and more educational and therapeutic. This has been a recent revelation of mine. One of my favorite moments with ARI so far has been with Healing Family, playing games with the participants. It is physical, but in a way that encourages bonding and solidarity rather than competition. I’m excited to see how ARI will redefine other concepts for me in the coming weeks.

CCT Volunteer Dakota Van Deursen Blog Post (FORRU placement)

The past two weeks have been a true whirlwind. FORRU, the Forest Restoration Research Unit based out of Chiang Mai University, does such great work for the region and the world; it's a true honor to be a part of it all!

                My first week, the other TEAN interns and I were flung head-first into pretty intensive field-work days. Tuesday, we hosted an education day for American college students at the FORRU nursery at Baan Mae Sa Mai. Nestled way up in the hills of Doi Suthep-Pui National Park, it served at the best orientation imaginable -- we got to learn more about FORRU's 'framework species' planting method, then take hikes to visit old planting sites.

                The rest of the week, we spent preparing the plots at Mon Long (near Moncham). Each day, we left campus near 7:00am and didn't return until past 6:00pm! They were long days, but I don't mind it. We spent most of this time removing pine needles from the forest floor to aid in a soil acidity test being performed by one of the staff members.

                It all boiled down to Saturday, though: Big Planting Day at Mon Long with the help of students from MaeJo University, park rangers, the Rajapruek Institute, and others. We put all of the prepared trees in their holes, then began work fertilizing them all. It was certainly rewarding to take a step back and admire our handiwork!

                Following the labor-intensive yet massively successful previous week, our second week was spent mostly in the FORRU office on-campus, working to create electronic copies of Herbology charts. I've gotta say, I'm impressed by how much the simple act of typing differnet species' binomial nomenclature over and over again can affect how you recognize words (and their associated plants).

                Wednesday was spent on the road to and from Tham Pha Thai National Park in Lampang province. In preparation for the next Big Planting Day, we spent the morning loading 2500 seedlings into the truck (learning important Thai words such as "snail," "millipede," and "snake" along the way). The drive that day afforded some of the best, albeit fleeting, scenery I've yet seen in Thailand.

                So, now I'm two weeks in, and I'm totally hooked. I can't wait to see what the next five weeks have in store for me. Not that I want to find out too quickly, mind you! I'd like that departure date to stay as far away as possible, too.

CCT Volunteer Annie Kaplan Blog Post (Temple School Wat Khuang Singha)

Sawatdeeka World! Hi, I’m Annie Kaplan from Danville CA checking on during week three of her internship at Wat Khuang Sing School. I am a Comparative Cultures and Politics/ Secondary Education double major at Michigan State University who hopes to one day work as a history teacher in America. This summer I have decided to make a daring decision and work as an English teacher in Thailand. Both the country and subject were extremely unfamiliar to me which made this a big decision. It was not an easy choice and has not been easy thus far but I think it will all be worth it in the end.

Our group has now been in Thailand 5 and a half weeks. We took classes and went on excursions the first three weeks but since then have been fully immersed in our internship placements. Through these experiences we are all learning so much and will come away from these 10 weeks having absorbed so much through just living and communicating in a new space.

There are 11 interns in total, but at my school it is just my friend Sarena and I. Every day we Uber to school to begin a day filled with learning, teaching, and facing something completely different than what we are accustomed to in the United States. Our first week, in my opinion, was the biggest culture shock I have had in Thailand thus far. Everything is so different compared to my public school upbringing. Our school is a Buddhist temple school, meaning that it’s a government run school with very strict rules. The kids wear a variety of uniforms throughout the week, and sing and chant whenever there’s a transition in the day. Teachers are tough, but show so much dedication to their practice. My favorite part has definitely been the amazing cook at our school who is able to cook for 300+ people and accommodate my strict vegetarian diet! The most shocking to me has been that teachers do not stay in one room, it’s the kids that do. Teachers rotate grades and classes throughout the day bringing everything they need with them as they travel. While I saw this as unfamiliar, the kids take to their daily tasks with more happiness than I’ve ever seen. As a sixth grader, I liked school but nowhere near as much as some of the students here do. When I was in middle school, I was constantly falling asleep in class but the way teachers command a room engages the students unlike any I’ve ever seen.

I am placed with P.4 through P.6 which are the oldest kids at the school. They are learning a range of subjects from clothing to daily actions to common English phrases. Making the transition from studying social science education to English education has been strange but there has not been a moment where I felt that I didn’t know what to talk about. Part of my time at Wat Khuang Sing is spent teaching, and part is spent observing how to be a good teacher. Structuring lesson plans and building activity blocks are skills I am working on with my mentor teacher, who is showing me different ways to engage students and present lessons. We rotate from PowerPoints to flashcards to working out of the book, a sure fire plan to keep students focused.

Games are another strategy used by the English teachers here which has been one of my harder tasks to tackle. Something about explaining a game in a foreign language just makes it a tad bit harder for both the kids and myself. There have been moments where I have gotten up in front of them to teach and the level they understand of the words coming out of my mouth has been zero. So yea, it’s been tough. I’ve been stressed and exhausted and overwhelmed but there’s something tremendously uplifting about seeing the smiling faces of my kids every day.