An Office Factotum

"The following content was contributed by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed or implied herein may not be the opinions of Green Communities Consulting."

By: Silvia Lawrence

“Teacher, are you hungry? Let’s eat dinner!” I put my book down, gave myself a fresh spritz of mosquito spray and peeked my head into the kitchen.

“Oh no, did Little One cook tonight? I hope we can eat it…” I teased, taking four plastic chairs from a stack near the door and setting them around our small dinner table.

“What will we eat?” asked Younger One, joining us at the table.

Little One smiled and placed three bowls on the table: lettuce boiled with turmeric, sour leaf soup, and rice.

Mae Sariang I by Silvia Lawrence

I was volunteering with a community-based organization in a town on the Thai side of the Burma border, sharing a small wooden house with three Burmese women. My roommates were from Burma’s Karen State, though their shared ethnicity did not mean they hadn’t all had very different childhoods. The youngest, whom we called “Little One,” was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, which she had left for the first time only a couple of years ago. Skinny One came from a Karen hill tribe village, though she had really spent most of her childhood hiding from soldiers out in the jungle, where she watched most of her family and many neighbors die. Younger One (who was… actually the oldest of us?) told me that hers was the most boring story, because she had grown up in a relatively peaceful area of the Karen State, a no fire zone where visits from the military were frequent but rarely violent.

“I chose to come over the border myself,” Younger One had explained to me. “I wanted to help my people.”

They all had such clear goals for their lives, and they talked about them with intense focus. I felt almost envious hearing them talk about their futures. While my American friends and I were constantly complaining and stressing over finding an interesting career or life path, overwhelmed by all the choices our privilege had laid out before us, these women knew exactly what their lives were for. These goals weren’t just hopes and dreams, but things they needed to do. They just had to find the resources to make them happen. Little One was going open an orphanage. Younger One planned to eventually become the director of our CBO. Skinny One was going to marry the boy she was in love with and move back to Burma.

“I want to have a house with a garden full of food,” she told me.

“What will you grow in your garden?” I asked her.

“Long beans, onions, and enough rice for the entire village. None of my family or neighbors will ever be hungry,” she answered, smiling. “Oh and I will grow mushrooms for you, Teacher. Because you love them.”

“Do you know how to grow mushrooms?” I asked.

“You can find out for me. Look on Google,” Skinny One replied confidently, and we both laughed because she was probably right. I had been doing a lot of Googling lately.

Mae Sariang II by Silvia Lawrence

Indeed, while I was technically supposed to be volunteering as an English and IT teacher, really I had become something of an office factotum. Like, “The light is broken again and no one can reach it? Someone fetch our giant Scandinavian teacher, she’ll be able to fix it.” Or, “Where do clouds come from? Ask Teacher, she’ll know.” I started to keep a list of questions in a small notebook to help me remember which facts I needed to check when I went to the coffee shop to use the Internet. Some of these included:

What is a rainbow?

Where did the sun come from? But how can it be a star? Why is it so different?

What about the moon?

What is thunder?

Explain about wind, rain, and snow.

Where do the planets, rocks, rivers, and other water come from?

Please explain about the beginning of the human race before Christ.

Man, these women wanted to know about everything. There was something so sweet about their questions, probably because they were so simple, the sorts of things I had had answered for me in elementary school. But my roommates’ curiosity about life was maybe the only thing childlike left in them. All only in their twenties, they had experienced more hardship and suffering and really just, living, then I probably ever would. Whenever we switched from talking about science or history to religion and philosophy, they would suddenly became wise old professors, wholly open-minded, tolerant, and understanding. They just, really got this life thing we were all doing.

One afternoon when my three months with them were drawing to a close, Little One and I sat on the porch eating ice cream and sticky rice scooped into a white bun. We were talking about refugees from other countries, and she looked up at me and said,

“Why do people always fight, Teacher? They all want power. They want natural resources. They want to control people. They want to stop being scared. But can’t we help them?”

With the right support and resources, these women could probably do anything.

 

Announcement

ANNOUNCEMENT

(update: project completed March 24th, 2013)

GCC will participate in a month long construction project in Hmawbi, Myanmar.  We are building adobe mud brick buildings for staff housing and class rooms. This will be at the new NEED-Burma Model Eco-Village. To learn about NEED-Burma and their projects please follow this link.