Conversations on a Tuk-Tuk
My apologies, but we are currently unable to upload our photos to this blog site from where we are at. We will do our best to get them up asap!
When you are on a Hero Holiday, there is no telling what kind of adventure is waiting for you around the corner, across the street, or really from the moment that you wake up and realize you have been blessed with another day to do something so life-giving. Yesterday was one of those days.
We thought we were going to be helping out at the drop in centre, in the border city in northern Thailand where we are here to work for two weeks. We arrived and thought that this would be a day of cleaning, meeting stateless families that are affected by the presence of this centre (they are able to get food, community support, medical help, and even stay overnight if they need to stay warm and safe) but we didn’t count on the adventure that would ensue!
We met up with the staff that work day after day with the stateless street kids that surround this bridge between two vastly different countries struggling to co-exist. The workers are full of love, grace, and compassion for each individual they meet and it shows in everything they do. We crossed the bridge, went through customs, and were now standing in the border city in Burma (Myanmar). The street was alive with chaos, conversation, and underneath it all, the struggle to survive. The workers put us in tuk-tuks (3 wheeled taxis) and we were off to the edge of the city to meet up with families and street children that they work with to educate, feed, and try to keep safe from exploitation. As we were going through the streets of this small Burmese city, I burst out laughing, as I looked over my shoulder to the other tuk-tuks with the Hero Holiday participants as they smiled and waved at me like this was a part of their everyday life! I think they somehow failed to see the irony in the scene that I saw as I watched them smiling and waving at the curious bystanders on the streets, laughing and joking as if they were the best of friends from years back. They have only known each other for a few days, but somehow, experiences like this, bond you together like no other.
Our world is so vast, yet experiences like Hero Holiday remind you of how humanity is still the same: each one of us needs to know that we belong, that someone cares, and that there is a place in the world for us. Today, watching these students with us, I saw them embody that hope and be changed in the process. I watched as they played tag with street children, brought them treats, held young mothers’ babies, hugged and were hugged back, laughed at childish antics, and cried at the pain of reality for the hands that they held. Today was a day full of the human experience and full of new understandings of the part we play to make the world a better and safer place.
On the tuk-tuk, I was chatting with one of the workers from the home. She is an inspiration to me and she is one of my heroes. She was laughing at the participants with us as we watched them buy birds in baskets from the children at the Buddhist temple in Burma and try to release them and ease their guilty consciences for buying the birds in the first place! She showed us how to love people where they are at, no matter how much you approve or disapprove of their choices, and she encouraged our participants to be that kind of humanitarian worker too. Today was a day of inspiration and realization, and today marked a change in how each one of our students’ saw themselves: as individuals who have a voice and a life that can bring change and love the world around them.
Tonight, during our debriefing, we talked about what this experience can mean when each one of them goes home. There was much laughter, inspiration, and tears. But underneath it all, there is hope.