A Lens for the Year

Ta Toad Krup (Sorry) to everyone for the sudden disconnect from their lives on my part. 14 hour days are quiet time consuming as it turns out. I haven’t had many meals that weren’t work meetings since I got to Khon Kaen. Aye!

I’m sitting in my house outside of Khon Kaen. The gangs of dogs that run around the streets at night are barking at something and will continue to bark at something until the roosters take over at 4 am. In the yard across the street, five to ten Thai grandparents sit on top of a low, rickety wooden table drinking Lao Cow (rice whiskey) crackling and making Isaan hollers as they prove to me for the tenth night in a row that people with wrinkles and white hair throw the best parties. They will outlast the night. Sometimes I wake up at 3 am to release the tumult in my stomach that accompanies eating chillis all day long and they are still up, making me feel like such a "grump-pa".

So I feel obliged to discuss the my purpose for leaving the States for a year,to talk about what it is am I doing here. I never really know how to answer this question. No one in the CIEE community really has a concise or all encompassing answer, but here’s my attempt.

Primarily, we are a study abroad program. As a Program Facilitator I am essentially running the program for a year along with a team of four recent post-grads. It will us who will be interacting with the students the most during each semester.

The program aims to give voice to those who suffer from development schemes. Within Issan (northeast Thailand) this is generally rural villages, ethnically Lao who have experienced marginalization by Bangkok elites through the process of nation building and industrialization. On one level what these program does is create a “more level-playing field”. By taking student (often Ivy league students) to villages we remove the abstraction of the classroom. The displacement caused by an illegally constructed dam is no longer a cold, distant idea but suffering experienced by people with faces and students have real relationships with. Arguments from a World Bank study begin to seem inconsistent and irrelevant to what students experience first hand.

This is but the beginning of the learning process. Creating awareness of issues gets students wondering what is my role with in this global economy?

In being consistent with our educational philosophy (see the works of Paulo Fierre and Myles Horton) we train the students to take on ownership of their own educational process, training them in facilitation and the planning and running of their own classes. Ideally, by the end of the program, students will be alone in the classroom. At this point we, as Program Facilitators will step back and relying primarily on "soft facilitation", challenging students to examine their intentions behind their work, pushing them from charity to reciprocity. Is their final project something they choose to do because it is "sexy"? Is it something they choose to do because they wanted a "landmark" to show for their personal experience that they can write home about and impress others? Or did they choose their project because they understood how it supported a community's movement in a way that deepens the relationship between themselves and villagers while furthering the movement's strategy towards justice? How do students move past the individual identities they have grown up with and its inherent self-indulgence to seeing themselves as connected to and active participants of, a larger community? This is the learning process, this is social change, this is education.