Open your eyes and the world will open up to you

Note: This blog is basically yesterday's journal typed up with some photos slotted in because I know people back home like to 'see' stuff. I'm having a great time, but I want this blog to be a real reflection of this experience- not all saccharine and twee. So I'll leave the stories of massages and gold temples for another blog. Here's a very different story-

"I knew I was volunteering in a third world country. But the poverty is hard to understand. I was angry at first to see skinny cats wander round the foundation. I pointed this out to Momo and she said “that’s what a cat’s supposed to look like Georgia, that’s how they look in India too; you feed them too much in England”. And I wonder which is true?

Then there’s the stories Thai staff told us about stray dogs in Chiang Rai getting driven to Vietnam and sold as meat. Wait, what? Cute fluffy stray dogs… but then I remembered horsemeat and Tesco and I wonder just how similar or different the East is from the West.

We were told in Orientation that we’ll be teaching in the poorest parts of the country. You don’t see that when the classrooms I teach in are pastel painted and decorated with children’s work and paper flowers. But the kids sleep on blankets on the floor in their homes and the nearby stream I’ve seen the hilltribe kids play, bathe and dive in is a murky brown. It could hold any number of diseases or snakes. But they are happy.

It’s hard to say what I really want to say here. It’s fascinating, for sure, this world so far from home. And weirdly, I’ve felt calm all the time I’ve been here- I’m happy to leave all my valuables in the back of a taxi for the day and trust the driver will return when we phone him, or dance in smoky clubs all night with people I met that morning.
If that’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that people are people. And however crazy it sounds, trust everyone you meet, everywhere you go; you’ll never be lost, alone or bored."