Project Sparks II trip to Vientiane, Laos from the 8th to the 22nd was a fruitful, fun and fulfilling one. We were 23 ordinary university students trying to make a difference in an extremely foreign land. We spent weeks preparing for the trip, raising funds and planning our lessons. A big part of me was feeling extremely excited to go, yet there was this other smaller part of me which wanted to just stay and enjoy the holiday season at home.
Looking back, I must say that I'm extremely glad that I didn't listen to that latter voice.
During the course of our stay, we were tasked with teaching English at Kao Liaw Secondary School, a school which is about a 45-minute drive from the city. In addition to this, we also helped in the concretizing of the school's grounds, which when we got there, was just uneven soil. It was something new to us, and I think we all learned quite a lot from the experience.
The students of Kao Liaw Secondary had a very limited grasp of the English language. It was simply not a language widely-spoken in the country. At times, we faced difficulty in getting them to understand what we were trying to teach. After all, we were teaching them a language using the language that we were supposed to be teaching them in the first place. They paid us all of their attention, at all times though, keenly copying everything we wrote down, and enthusiastically participating in any activity that we conducted.
Their eagerness to learn was really touching, and we found ourselves wishing that we had more time to teach them.
Concretizing the ground is an easy enough activity...if you have a cement mixer. However, in Laos, we did not have that luxury, and as such, we had to do it the old-fashioned way. We took stone, water, sand and cement, and we mixed them together until they reached the right consistency. It was literally back-breaking work. We had to transfer the raw materials over great distances too, one bucket at a time.
It could have been worse, had it not been for the help of the students of the school. We were surprised to see the children helping us out during their breaks, without any prompting from us or their teachers. They helped make up the numbers for our "human chain", and some of the older students took turns in shovelling too.
The teachers and students went out of their way to make us feel welcome, and when we were not teaching or doing manual labour, they involved us in their games, shared with us their music and fed us their local delicacies. They talked to us, tried to tell us more about their life, and they asked us about ours. The language barrier was shattered by their genuine warmth, and we formed a connection with them, in the short time we spent there.
I guess at the end of the day, we learned that sometimes, "Less is More". The students in Laos definitely had less than the students here. They didn't have fanciful gadgets, projectors, or laptops. Yet they had their own type of fun, playing games, dancing and just casually chatting with each other. They simply made the best out of what they had. As citizens of a more developed country, we are exposed to the bigger world, where there is always something better, just around the corner. It is so easy to get caught up in the pursuit of that "something better".
The trip also opened our eyes to a different side of the world. We're often exposed to western media, it's luxury and excesses. It's not often that we see that there are parts of the world where people are managing with very little, living close to poverty. Given the chance to do more, I most definitely would. The world's a big place, and for many of us who went for the trip, Laos was just a beginning.
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