for the children

If there is one thing I have learned in my year living in the Land of the Morning Calm, it is that Koreans love uniforms. For any special event or activity, there is a specific set of clothing that is to be worn. Matching is also quite common and popular (especially among siblings and couples). So it came as no suprise to me when the infamous "Korean Group" unloaded at the organic farm outside Vang Vieng and they were all wearing matching official Korea Youth Volunteer shirts and safari hats. We had been extremely excited that a Korean group was coming, but once they arrived, we were too shy to really talk to them. The necessary ice breaker came when I was unwittingly sitting with my guitar near me and the whole group accosted me out of nowhere and began demanding a pop song (luckily I recently learned how to play Beat It). Soon I was the center of attention, and of an impromptu photo shoot.

We had come to the farm hoping to volunteer, maybe teach English, or do some work with the crops. The disorganization of the farm made this difficult if not impossible. Working in the fields never materialized, and the teaching was only a couple hours a day in the evenings. This left us with a lot of time to kill during the day, and the 3km trip to town left us a bit stranded. There was originally some work to do pedaling booze to tubers heading down the river, but the overcast skies meant few tubers and lackluster sales. So it came that we eventually asked if we could tag along with the Koreans on their projects. Rather than just kind of helping out, we became full fledged Korean Youth Volunteers. The director's biggest concern was that they didn't have any extra T-Shirts for us. Luckily, they did have extra name tags.

The Korean Youth Volunteer Association has been working with the farm for several years now, and they (in conjunction with Mr. T, the farm's owner) have really been a gold mine for the local villages. They have set up several community centers and classrooms where there are English classes or other activities every night for any interested youth. The English classes are quite the experience. There is a basic introductory level class that packs the mudbrick classroom to the gills with about 70 (sometimes twice that) children aged 5-13. Having an introduction shouted at you by all those tiny voices is intense. The upper level class is smaller and more serious, with mostly teenage students, some of whose English is quite impressive. The kids all come on a voluntary basis every night to this open air simple classroom with only floor level seating and low desks. They are incredibly enthusiastic about the class and learning English. It's hard to imagine anything more different from teaching English in a Korean Hagwon.

Anyway, the Korean group took over the English classes from the regular teachers, which was quite interesting, considering many of the Koreans hardly spoke any English. There was mostly chaos and some games in those classes. Mostly what we did with the group was daytime working projects. We added a sink and expanded the patio of the bathroom at the community center, and then spent two days repainting and cleaning a nearby school building.

Now one problem that you can run into with volunteer work is that the volunteers, while enthusiastic, may not be experts in the type of work that is to be done. When you throw twenty Korean kids who have done nothing but study for their entire lives together with 10 five gallon buckets of paint which they are supposed to mix to a consistent color and then apply neatly to a shool building, the results can be mixed. After our first morning, the results were definitely mixed. No one had taped off the trim that was to be in a different color (until after we began painting) or laid down drop cloth. There were liters of sea foam colored paint in places it shouldn't have been. There were at least two shades of sea foam going on the school. Our pace was extremely slow. I was discouraged. by the end of the second day, however, the situation had improved vastly: the tones had been adjusted, some locals who actually know how to paint had taped off and fixed up the trim, and a full scale scrubbing operation had removed the globs of paint from the concrete entrance.

The school was about 700 meters from the farm, but the group had a special air conditioned bus (yes, there was even a microphone for speech giving that was used multiple times on the three minute journey) to take us all there. Every morning when we climbed on the bus to go out to the village, a crowd of children from the village would be waiting for us with special flower bouquets for the Koreans. They would hop on the bus with us and ride back out to the village. When we left for lunch or to go home for the day, the kids would all load onto the bus for the ride with us and then walk back to the village. The whole time we were working on the school, the kids gathered to help, or mostly play. The group handed out about 24 kites, which were constantly zipping through the air. One team of Koreans was blowing up and handing out balloon animals and swords. Periodically we would all stop work and ladies from the village would hand out fresh coconuts for us to drink from. The whole atmosphere was much more like a carnival than a work site. Despite my initial cynicism, the experience turned out to be quite positive. I realized that painting the school was only part of the intended purpose of the project. The cultural exchange, the fun atmosphere for the village people, the sense of accomplishment for the Korean students who don't get many chances to work with their hands, these were all important aspects of the project as well.

We felt guilty bailing on the olympic games the last afternoon to go tubing, but it was time for us to move on.