Wednesday, December 19, 2012

An Apology and a Preface

Wynne Hedlesky
1214 local time
Düsseldorf, Germany

Beloved readers, I am deeply sorry for my extended absence from the “blogosphere”. I will apologize for Kristian as well. Sadly, he is currently working on a novel and may not post here again for a while. One might think that hitchboating around the world is basically an extended vacation, but you would be surprised at how busy a person can get. We have also been in some fairly remote places, where even electricity is a luxury. Hard to blog if your computer is dead. As for the internet—well. When we had it, I was frantically trying to complete graduate school applications so that I could submit them before I got on a sailboat to cross the Indian Ocean. Turns out there’s not internet out there, either.

Excuses, excuses. I have been burning to say something about the eight months we spent in Asia, and only now, in the comfort and leisure of a snuggly first-world Christmastime, am I finally finding an opportunity to post some words on our experiences there, the highlight of which was, by far, the time that Kristian and I spent living among the emerald mountains and kind-hearted people of northern Laos.

As a preface to the post that follows, I would like to briefly describe what we were doing there. Kristian and I spent four months volunteering for Bambusschule, a German non-profit organization that focuses on improving education and health care along the Ou River in northern Laos. We lived with a Lao family, in a Lao village, three hours away by boat from the nearest town with automobiles or the Internet. In most of the villages where we worked, we were the only English speakers. Our job, roughly, was to teach English and carry out some maintenance projects on the buildings—three schools and a boarding house—that the organization has built in the region. 
  
For the first few weeks, we had some small degree of guidance from the organization’s Field Manager. He acquainted us with the key figures in the villages where we would be working, and helped us plan the summer’s maintenance projects. He provided next to no guidance about the English teaching program, however, other than showing me a box full of paper, pencils, and other school supplies and telling me this was what I had to work with. No book, no syllabus, no notes from previous volunteers, nothing. He seemed completely unconcerned at the lack of structure or guidance—“Bo pen nyang, relax, this is Laos!” he said. He was never particularly interested in that part of the organization’s work; he focused more on plumbing projects. He had a love for building things out of little blue PVC pipes. After about a month, he went home to Australia on vacation. Shortly thereafter, he was fired.

So Kristian and I were left more or less alone for three months in rural Laos to find the best way to accomplish the organization’s goals and represent its values. For the building maintenance projects, we had to get by with our meager knowledge of the Lao language—we had no translator while purchasing and transporting supplies, or negotiating with village leaders. We were also supposed to incorporate as much English teaching into our schedule as possible, but with the added complication that school was out of session for most of our time there, and so we had no scheduled time for English class, and no classroom in which to teach. And yet it could hardly have been better.

We took advantage of our lack of direct supervision and the open-ended directives to begin designing a new English program for the organization, based on the knowledge of second language acquisition that Kristian gained during his university studies in linguistics and his participation in a research project about the subject conducted by the university of Cologne in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmegen. Throughout everything we did, we worked closely with the organization’s founder in Germany (or as closely as you can when you can only communicate every two weeks or so). The core of our new program is informal interaction—that is, play. It was not difficult to convince the village kids to get involved. By the end of the summer, some of the kids we worked with had gone from robotic repetition of “How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you” to the ability to express their likes and dislikes, ask questions, explain aspects of their daily life, and open up the all-important highways of communication between people from vastly different worlds.

I hope that the opportunity to interact with us ends up playing a positive role in those children’s lives. Learning about their way of life was certainly a valuable experience for me. More than anything, I continued to be struck by how so many aspects of Lao daily life stubbornly remained unexplained, regardless of the fact that I had lived in such close contact with Lao people for several months. The richness of cultures is such that people as different as me and my Lao hosts can find vast areas of common ground, while there always remain differences that make each group unique, and incite in us curiosity about our fellow human beings. I hope that the exposure to foreign people and language both instills in the children I interacted with a desire to learn about the world outside their village, as well as an understanding of the value of their own unique way of life.


P.S. If you are interested in volunteering with Bambusschule (Bamboo School), contact Bodo Peters: info@die-bambusschule.de, or visit die-bambusschule.de

 

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