Cara Mooney Blog Post (Wildflower Home)

Hi, I’m Cara! I’m 19 years old, heading into my second year of law with Politics in University College Dublin. I’m here in Chiang Mai volunteering for four weeks with Cultural Canvas Thailand.

My placement for CCT is in the Wildflower home just outside of Chiang Mai that accommodates single mothers who are victims of domestic violence. It is an amazing organisation run by the Sisters of the Good Shepard with the aim of teaching the mothers life skills so that they will be able to sustain themselves when they leave the home. I’m a strong believer in equality for women so when I heard about the programme in Wildflower and all that they do to empower the mothers, I knew it was for me!

Working in Wildflower the past two weeks has been one of the most incredible and inspiring experiences of my life. The treatment of single mothers in Thai culture is extremely different to what I am used to back home. In Ireland it is neither strange nor shameful to raise children as a single parent. Thai culture is very different in that the women are shunned from family and friends regardless of whether or not they suffered from abuse. This stigma surrounding single mothers makes Wildflower home all the more inspiring as it creates a warm, friendly and comforting environment. I get a very strong sense of community here as everyone is always willing to help out without a word of complaint. It is almost as though the mothers past experiences have created an unbreakable bond between them making Wildflower a very special place for anyone lucky enough to experience it.

Everyday at Wildflower is different from the rest, no two jobs are ever the same! Myself and my friend Martha who I came here with have done jobs from clearing out a mushroom shed, teaching english, minding the kids, we have even poured cement! Not something either of us ever thought we would do.. Although I have loved everyday here so far, there is one in particular that stands out for me; this week one of the volunteers from New York decided to make vision boards with the mothers and present them to the group. This was one of the most eye opening and emotional moments so far in Wildflower home as all each of them wanted in life was a family, a home, money, the opportunity to travel and proper education for their children all of which many of us take for granted back home. This experience wasn't emotional in the sense that it upset me but more so uplifting as the willingness to hope and dream was still alive in all of the mothers regardless of the difficult past they suffered.

After everything we've seen and done so far I cannot wait to see what the next two weeks have in store for us! :) Thank you!!

Martha Mc Garry Blog Post (Wildflower Home)

Hi I’m Martha and I am volunteering with CCT for four weeks. I am 19 years old and study law with social justice at home in Ireland.  I decided to get involved in overseas volunteering because I have always wanted to travel and experience a new culture. I have also always been interested in global relations and creating a more equal world. Therefore I really wanted an opportunity to learn about what inequality looks like in practice. I spend a great deal of time writing about how the Global North is damaging the Global South through over consumption and how this must end. However I always felt that my opinions were invalid if I made no effort to actually se the consequences of this global inequality. 

Furthermore women’s rights is a matter I feel strongly about and so when I heard about the opportunity to work in The Wildflower Home for single mothers I really wanted to get involved. My friend Cara and I decided to travel here to Chiang Mai together. So far I have had an amazing experience in the home. There are currently five mothers in the home. There is a great sense of community among the mothers, the Sisters and the children. They have made us feel really welcome in the home and the experience has been so enjoyable. The work we do is very varied, from minding the children to gardening to making a cement path. 

It can be challenging at times to see the stark contrast between how these children grow up and how I, or many people in the West, grew up. It makes little difference to them, as the kids are all happy, healthy and adorable. There is always something to do in the home and the biggest challenge is having a noticeable impact. The staff, mothers and other volunteers already do a fantastic job of running the home. Many of these volunteers have been coming for years and have a settled role in the home. A challenge for the rest of my time will be figuring out the best way I can use my own personal skills to be helpful in the home.

CCT Volunteer Kyra DiFrancesco 2nd Blog Post (FORRU)

Things at FORRU have really been looking up. At the beginning of my internship, I was worried that we didn’t really have our place on the team. Everyone else had their projects, but my fellow American interns and I were mostly doing data entry. After bringing up my concerns, though, we were able to meet with the founder of FORRU, and as I suspected, there was a lot of work to be done! One of my fellow interns, Anna, is now taking on a project with a professor at CMU, Dakota and I are now working on a seed germination experiment, and all three of us will now be working to update FORRU’s website.

The past week has had a lot of late nights working on getting our seed germination project started. We only have two and a half weeks left, so we need to work fast. It’s been pretty difficult due to the language barrier and lack of materials. FORRU doesn’t have a dedicated lab, so we had to get creative and turned the office kitchen into our own makeshift seed lab. We had to purchase our own tables, venture out to a flower market and use what little Thai we know to buy seeds, go back and forth to too many 7/11s to get miscellaneous supplies, get interdepartmental lab supply loans, and, in a desperate hour, wander into a random lab on campus to borrow a graduated cylinder. This past Monday night we were in our lab until 11pm…blending leaves. It was actually pretty fun, and I’m so glad that we have this opportunity to experiment with FORRU (and hopefully manage to make a scientific breakthrough in three weeks). 

CCT Volunteer Dakota Van Deursen 2nd Blog Post (FORRU)

                My experience with FORRU started off as a whirlwind, and it hasn't died down yet in the slightest. Though I have had less days in the field lately, I have been just as busy helping out around the office, keypunching data, and (most excitingly!) starting up my own laboratory.

                For almost two full weeks from when we left off (Tham Pha Thai), I worked in the office on data entry. Around 20 years ago, someone wrote down a bunch of tree species in a set of books. FORRU now needs them electronically -- and they aren't gonna type themselves!

                Data entry was interspersed with hammering out some tags for the Tham Pha Thai trees. Literally. The TEAN interns spent two whole days on the landing with hammers and alphanumeric stamps, stamping out over 2500 aluminum tags.

                This past weekend, I volunteered at an all-day endeavour: youth camp. FORRU hosted the Chiang Mai Demonstration School for a day of learning, hiking, and conservation. Though really tiring, I had a blast that day, and got to support the FORRU team teaching kids how to conserve, restore, and sustain.

                The last week and a half, though, has been dominated by the most exciting facet yet: our experiment. Once our Thai language classes were over, FORRU's director held a meeting with the TEAN interns to ask us all what we were looking to do -- I was one of two who were selected to bootstrap opening up a laboratory and performing a scientific experiment.

                So far, everything is looking good. After days of running willy-nilly trying to track down all of the supplies necessary for the lab (a converted coffee break room) to function, Kyra and I are preparing to dive head-first into the science.  We hope that, by the end of the next couple of weeks, we have made a lasting impression on FORRU's plantation monitoring techniques.

CCT Volunteer Nora Demilta 2nd Blog Post (Art Relief International)

This past week with ARI has been a bit of a different experience. We had two new volunteers join the team, Danielle and Queenie. They’re both from Ireland and both are really kind and fun to work with. They let me tease them about their Irish colloquialisms and they do the same for my American slang. I’m thankful for their addition and they’ve already contributed to some stellar workshops. Danielle and I teamed up on a Hope Home workshop last week where we made jetpacks out of cardboard and plastic bottles. We collaborated on the idea and it went really well! The children at Hope Home had a blast with the jet packs they made. Whenever a kid would finish their project, one of the volunteers would lift them up and fly them around the room. This always elicited a few giggles from the students! This was my favorite workshop with Hope Home thus far and it would not of happened without Danielle’s help.

It was interesting when Danielle and Queenie first arrived at ARI. All of the TEAN volunteers tried so hard to help them and teach them the ways of ARI. We acted as if we had been here for years when in reality it had only been about 10 days. It’s funny how quickly we adapted to working and living here. I hate to think that I only have about three more weeks in Thailand. I’ve learned so much and had so much fun; I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to have to say goodbye to the students, my coworkers, or the other TEAN members. In my last days I’m trying live as fully as possible and enjoy every moment. I want to be rich in memories for when I go back to the states!

CCT Volunteer Jack Pooler 2nd Blog Post (Thai Freedom House)

Hi Everyone!

I am approximately 4 weeks into my internship at Thai Freedom House right now. Currently, there are no classes being taught as we just finished our most recent semester about a week and half ago. We held a “graduation” ceremony for all of the students on July 7th that wonderful. Almost all of Thai Freedom House’s volunteers, students, and employees were there. Every student received a certificate for each class that they took. We finished graduation with a large dinner provided by Free Bird Cafe!

Since then, we have been putting in a lot of work towards creating a more standard curriculum for the classes that we offer. Thai Freedom rotates through volunteers, teachers, and employees fairly regularly. With no classes being offered until September, now is the perfect time to catch up on the kind of infrastructure that will make transitioning new employees and teaching volunteers a lot more simple in the future. Right now that involves developing different leveled English curriculums since our students all come in with different levels of vocabulary and speaking proficiencies. Additionally, we have been working on training exercises and lesson plans for when new employees are hired at Free Bird Cafe. All of our current employees are from Shan state, and so we are working on them with their English as it pertains to their specific jobs in the Cafe, and we hope these exercises can be used for future employees as well. In the past, curriculums and training of employees has changed as people come and go, so we hope this will streamline things moving forward

I have also officially started my tutoring sessions with some of the Cafe’s employees. Most of them already have a solid foundation of English, so we have been working more on communication skills, pronunciation, and how to interact with customers since they work in the cafe. While it is still early in the tutoring process, I think it is going very well and I am excited to see the progress they have achieved by the end!

CCT Volunteer Mansur Alam (BEAM and ARI)

My name is Mansur Alam, this summer I have been blessed with a wonderful opportunity to spend 2 months volunteering in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I have come to volunteer with the Cultural Canvas Thailand through EIL Explore programme. It is a dream of mine to work with ethnic minorities and Refugees because I myself is a refugee from Burma. I’ve spend my early childhood living in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. And I came to Ireland in 2009, never having attended school and with no English I have faced many difficulties and challenges every day with the language and school work.

So I know what the situation is like for the people living in such camp because I can relate. this is why I have chosen to volunteer here in Chiang Mai where I heard about the Burmese refugee students who left the country and now want to go to university in Thailand.

I will be teaching science at the BEAM foundation in Chiang Mai two days a week, Tuesday and Friday. BEAM is an organisation that provide education to the Burmese refugees who did not had the opportunity to go to college or complete their education in Burma. The aim of this project is to prepare the students to passed the GED exam so that they can apply to university in Thailand.

In my free time I will be working with the Art Relief International (ARI) programme where I will be working on different workshops such as, visiting foster home, children schools and many more. I am very excited to be here and can’t wait for my work to begin.

Thanks,

Alam