I ask myself daily, “What on earth is a dynamic learning and organisational development professional doing volunteering in Chiang Mai, Thailand at a center for boys at-risk of exploitation and trafficking?”
When it comes to performing work such as leadership development, team effectiveness, coaching and facilitation, organisational culture and climate, instructional design, performance management and talent management – I’m qualified and experienced with 21 years working in the corporate world.
I’m also perfectly comfortable in the corporate environment with people wearing slick business suits, going to back-to-back meetings, deciphering an in-box flooded with unread emails requiring attention, working tirelessly long days in an air-conditioned open plan office environment with rows and rows of desks and chairs, being surrounded by industrious hard-working people with their heads down being busy busy busy, conducting intelligent business chatter at the printer, craving morning and afternoon caffeine injections to fuel the day, taking phone calls, answering questions, doing this, doing that, work work work… ALL THIS I KNOW WELL!
What I don’t know well is volunteering in a developing country, being confronted daily with issues of child slavery, trafficking and exploitation. In this environment I am neither qualified and experienced, nor even comfortable.
My new working environment is the Urban Light Youth Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, just blocks away from the red-light-district, on a small Soi off the bustling Night Bazaar, and 50 metres away from a Mosque. It is a four-storey un-air-conditioned hot box. The ground floor contains an open space for our daily lunch and training. A small kitchen containing a single sink and two electric hot plates is where our beautiful young housekeeper produces the most amazing daily meals. The second floor is the main hub for the boys with bean bags galore, games, computers, a TV and Playstation. The third floor is for the staff, with basic table and chairs for us to congregate around. We also have a newly furnished room for volunteers to be housed. Finally the fourth floor which includes an open outdoor rooftop area, is empty and awaiting a purpose and furnishing.
My clients are a little different from those found in the corporate world. I am here to serve, love, support and empower young vulnerable boys aged between 8 – 20 years. They are unskilled and uneducated, some homeless and living on the streets, having been sent from their small rural villages to the city to make money to support their family. They often arrive at the Youth Center dirty and tired from an evening searching for a meal, finding a place to sleep, even striving to earn money, any way that they can. This could be selling flowers to tourists, wandering the streets looking for opportunities, and for many of them with no options and no choices, working in bars where they are sexually exploited by western ‘heterosexual’ middle-aged men, who pay them a few hundred baht to perform sexual acts. To me, they’re just young boys wanting to play like boys, be loved, accepted and helped out of the shackles of the slavery of exploitation.
A day at the Urban Light Youth Center can present our small team of four staff, the director and a couple of volunteers, with moments of true joy, incredible frustrations, challenges never faced before and great sadness. Just in my short time here I have celebrated a few boys making excellent personal choices, showing initiative and securing themselves jobs and getting a permanent roof over their heads (for which we support them financially). I have felt the disappointment and sadness when a boy made a bad decision, stole some money, ran away for a couple of months, lived it up, then returned to the city and was arrested. He is now in an adult prison outside of the city.
We close our doors in the late afternoon and send our beautiful young boys in to a night of unknown temptations and aloneness, where boys are often forced to be men. And they wear the marks the following day when they arrive at the Center, with bruises or new hand-made tattoos on their young infant limbs. Then there’s the unique challenges of helping a boy who desperately wants to embark upon a different path by going back to school. This requires us to get proof of his identification and birth records, which means a long journey to his small poor rural home village, only to find that his parents couldn’t afford to pay to register him, so there is no record that he exists. We see tears, laughter, we see boys shutting the world out to protect themselves, we see aggression, we see friendships form, changes in behaviour develop … we look for brighter happier futures for them all.
Although the environment and my clients here are very different from anything I have ever been confronted by before, I have found a way to use my skills to help Urban Light in a period of significant transition. My overall purpose for the next 6 months is to help the Founder of Urban Light bring to life her vision for the future. Daily that translates into all manner of tasks from re-writing job descriptions, developing recruitment processes and conducting interviews for the new Thailand Director, coaching and mentoring the staff, being energetic and positive, reviewing policies and procedures, and all importantly having fun.
Amongst the hard work, the challenges, and the emotions, there is certainly a great deal of enjoyment. We eat together every day as a family and the food is always amazing, although I am a little scared of a few traditional northern Thai dishes, which do not have the blood from the meat excluded. We have afternoon excursions to the park, the local pool and the waterfall, even to the movies where I enjoyed my first Hollywood film all in Thai (Ewan McGregor is nowhere near as hot talking Thai as he is with his Scottish accent). We play board games and UNO, we bake yummy muffins and biscuits; even learn how to make jewellery.
A few things that are the same for me here – the deep need and love for my morning and afternoon coffee (sometimes replaced by amazing Mango Smoothies for $1.00), the connection I have with this inspiring team of individuals that I work with daily, and the opportunity I have to just be me. I even break into song on a regular basis at work, and I’ve always done that in the corporate world! There’s even an occasional martini enjoyed after work on a Friday night…
It’s a privilege to be here, to be accepted, needed and most importantly, to be able to help out a cause that for so long has tended to focus on girls, whilst boys have been neglected, yet are equally vulnerable of sexual exploitation. I just hope that I can truly add some value and make a difference while I am here…
If you would like to know more about the organisation Urban Light, or Love 146, an organisation I am visiting in Cambodia, or watch a video that features these two organisations talking about exploitation and child slavery check out below…
From Sydney Harbour to Ping River 