Throw a Party
Redefining education and aid in Thailand
Article and Photos by Darren Legge
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| A community of unregistered workers, known as “scavengers,” search through the trash at the massive Khon Kaen landfill in order to earn money selling recyclable goods. |
I have mined bottles from the landfill with my family. I have faced eviction by developers in the slums. And I have stood for subsistence living with my host mom and dad.
At each homestay, I have come to understand another fractured piece of globalization and development and their effects on the world’s poor. Yet, as I leave one community and move to the next, I cannot help but feel guilty for the transitory nature of my stay. It’s hard not to feel privileged when, as students in a developing country, a group of 31 Americans might be called the experts on the various impacts of development on native communities.
Fortunately, so long as we recognize our advantages—and use them to serve others—privileged students can become valued agents of change in their communities abroad.
For us students on the Council on International Educational Exchange program in Khon Kaen, Thailand, all this required was developing an easy-to-use three-step plan:
1. Redefine education.
2. Redefine help.
3. Throw a party.
Redefine Education
Sixth graders in Khon Kaen were given the opportunity to design their curriculum for one semester. They surveyed their friends and family and found that Dengue fever was strangely prevalent—so they dedicated their semester to learning about the disease and identifying how they could intervene. Education became meaningful to the children because teachers gave them ownership over its direction.
At CIEE, we controlled the content of our education too. And, like the elementary school students, we were challenged to move beyond just understanding problems to using our education to do something about them.
We discovered that we could only do so collectively. In fact, we did everything collectively—together as students and together with the communities of activists with whom we lived, worked, and played.
Classes at CIEE were called “exchanges.” That’s code for conversations with host-country friends about their lives—conversations which took place on the floor, in a circle, for three or four or five hours at a time. In other words, we learned from real people about real, current, meaningful trends and issues.
Said one student: “I have learned that the power of one is not to make a difference singularly, but to join others and make a difference as a community. And in communities there is power to change.”
Students become leaders when they inspire a vision inside a group of committed friends. This is how study abroad becomes more like social justice than about it.
Redefine Help
As we stepped over used syringes on a tour of the Khon Kaen landfill, CIEE students came upon an incinerator. It was built by the Danish government in recompense for colonization; it was used once before it broke and was never fixed.
In fact, local residents never wanted it. This is just one example of the oppressive nature of the word “help.”
Much the way we at CIEE, as students, controlled the direction of our own education, we learned that successful community initiatives are led by communities, for their own ends. Only in this way can people feel ownership over their development.
One day, Kovit Boonjear, a friend of CIEE-Thailand, wondered where his trash went—so he followed a truck to the landfill. When he found whole communities there, he stopped for dinner. While eating, drinking, and gambling, he made friends and learned their stories.
Scavenger Khampuk Khwankla recalls, “We used to never meet together. He got us to talk together about our problems. He asked us if we wanted the government to help us. He brought in outside knowledge and strengthened our community.”
Boonjear explains: “I try to make [the community] feel confident that it can solve the problems itself.”
As outsiders, therefore, we can be valuable. But our role is not to “help” by imposing our ideas of progress and development but to facilitate the connections and capacities that empower communities to address their own needs.
Throw a Party
“CIEE brings people together,” notes prominent Thai scholar and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sulak Sivaraska. “It helps them come towards a common vision of how to be, how to live, together.”
In Thailand, we were studying globalization and development, and their effects on various communities—from displacement to pollution to misrepresentation. Each of these effects was distinct yet connected, often in ways that only we, who had the luxury of traveling and living among diverse communities across Thailand, could see.
As our time in Thailand waned, we began whispering about ways to forge connections that could propagate long after we left. We decided to throw a party.
And by party, I mean an all-day community gathering that would bring together everyone we had met during the semester for a celebration. The idea grew so large that we closed the block and attracted more than 500 people. The festival included dancing, painting murals, and running a market for the crafts of each community.
More than a celebration, this event provided a forum to connect communities that were struggling with the multifarious changes wrought by globalization. It facilitated the building of a grassroots network around ideas like student activism, alternative education, and human rights.
For example, we brought together villagers from northeast Thailand affected by mining, dams, and other development projects. We gave them a space to talk, in their own language, about the use of human rights frameworks as tools for demanding their communities’ right to self-determination.
We set aside a couple of hours for the discussion. But it spilled into the street for five or six.
In fact, our host community friends are still talking. And our community gathering was quickly promoted to a semi-annual event—at the locals’ behest.
Our project made a difference because it reconceived the role of privileged outsiders in communities that host foreign students. Rather than suffer the fate of a broken Danish incinerator, we realized that students can be leaders even as they listen and learn.
We made a difference to each of the disparate communities struggling to be heard—from the farmers to the scavengers to the schoolchildren—that took us in and shared its story.
And, most importantly, “the party” will continue to make a difference after we’ve left. We know we can’t stay forever, but we can help communities begin to craft collaborative solutions to the social and environmental problems we learn about in our studies abroad.
Study abroad need not perpetuate a global imbalance whereby the richer travel and study at the expense of the poor. In fact, it can be a remarkable headwater for a global countercurrent to inequity and injustice. If only we threw more parties.
Darren Legge recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a major in environmental studies. After studying abroad he became connected with a network of returned study abroad students working toward justice and sustainability called ENGAGE—the Educational Network for Global and Grassroots Exchange. His advice to other students for adapting to a new culture is to "watch what others do—and try everything."