Day 5/6: Real Work Begins

The first weekend ended with pictures and delicious food, and a new week began! After spending the first few days as tourists, we adopted our real identity as GROW (Grassroots on-site work) student volunteers. Mai had given us a few assignments on the orientation day (See ‘Day 2: Taxi to KWAT, please?’), so we started working right away after getting a breakfast (or more like a brunch for me) on Day 5 (Monday).

(Note: this post entails our GROW work and its details. Readers who want to know more about exciting adventures and encounters in Chiang Mai other than meaningful GROW work should refer to other blog posts)

Certainly, a non-governmental organization like KWAT has lots of work that needs help. For maximum efficiency, our GROW team split the work among ourselves: Lisa and Ritika worked on finding the missing information and points of improvement on the KWAT’s activity report; Anthony took responsibility of creating more effective designs for the webpage, specifically the ‘Shop’ page; and I organized and summarized the financial transactions between GlobeMed at Dartmouth and KWAT. Specifically, Ritika and Lisa scrutinized all of 30-page report and added notes to a copy of the report when they were unable to locate crucial information. For instance, the report did not include any information on how the organization raised awareness of Violence Against Women Day commemoration. We will discuss these points in question with the rest of KWAT to complete the report. Meanwhile, Anthony devised more visible fonts (including color and size of words) and layouts to effectively reach out to potential donors and customers (for the Kachin crafts). Later in the trip, he will discuss his designs with the KWAT’s webmaster to realize his ideas. In my case, I looked into the amount of cash we received for our trip and found out that we received much less than we should have. In turn, I sent an e-mail to Dartmouth treasurer’s corner to further investigate this issue. I also researched on how to set up a business PayPal account upon Mai’s request.

On Tuesday (Day 6 I can’t believe it’s already July), we traveled to KWAT office and met with workers of KWAT and a volunteer from France. One by one, members of the GROW team discussed the direction and progress of the work with Mai. I was confirmed that KWAT will proceed with setting up the PayPal account, probably from next week when time frees up. For the cash, apparently there were two wire transfers from GlobeMed to KWAT, causing confusion in the amount of money given to us. For the rest of the day, we continued working on the same things as the day before.

For lunch, KWAT provided us with traditional Kachin-style cuisine. I especially remember spiced cucumber salad and dragonfruit that looked like slices of pear with a countless amount of little black seeds.

After lunch, we had the first English class with four of KWAT employees. They spoke a decent amount of English and made us revise the curriculum. After a brief round of introductions, we asked them why they want to learn English and how did they start learning basic English. They wanted to improve their English skills to the point where they could converse fluently with native English speakers and translate English documents into their own Kachin language. Although we only did an activity of describing a random image in English, we could formulate the direction and method of curriculum for future lessons.

I’m looking forward to more work with KWAT!!

-Hoon