Far-Sighted

11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 8:30 a.m.- 5 p.m. Saturday, and 8:30 a.m.- 2 p.m. Sunday are my work hours at Elite Prep. My forty hours are spent preparing lesson plans for my SAT Writing Class, 3rd/4th grade Book Club and 9/10thgrade Book Club. I teach 3-hour length classes. I give out vocabulary quizzes and reading quizzes. I lead discussions on the books. I do “fun” activities about reading and writing and grammar. I go over SAT test questions and how to write a good essay for the SAT. I grade and edit SAT essays.

But in the midst of my teaching and planning, my efforts also lead to constructing a nursery for marine life, building a preschool, harvesting a fish farm, researching how to genetically modify fish, and mining pearls.

A purpose of Sustainable Development Research Foundation is to find ways to provide for the needs of communities all over Thailand. I love how while I’m teaching at the profit center of Elite Prep where some of the smartest, most well-off kids of Thailand come for tutoring, I am connected to developing other communities in need around Thailand.

The past year I have known in my mind the mission behind SDRF, and thought it nice and wonderful, but it didn’t really move from my mind to impact my heart until my recent visit to one of the many sites in Thailand that SDRF works at, the remote, Got Yow Yai island in the south of Thailand.

An hour and 15 minutes flight from Bangkok to Phuket, a 30-minute speed boat ride to a port at what looked at first like Gilligan’s Island, and an hour truck drive from there, it was the farthest outside of a city I have been in Thailand. While traveling on the winding roads I felt like I was in Waxhaw on some forgotten country road, but instead of the scenery of cotton fields and cow pastures, I saw rubber tree forests and water buffalo fields.

The first stop was the construction site of the nursery for fish, which will keep some of the fish SDRF is harvesting once the fish start to mature. After the tsunami, SDRF entered the community and saw that the fisherman were fishing, but not getting much profit from their work. They were lacking knowledge of how to run fishing as a real business. I love how SDRF asked what the islanders needed help with and came up with the entrepreneurial idea of trying to start a farm to genetically modify fish, which hopefully will make the fishermen more profit.

Epiphanies were popping in my brain at this first site about how I’m part of this concrete block foundation. By attempting to build up the students I teach at Elite, I’m helping the workers here as they build up the lives of those in the community.

I learned on our trip that Elite isn’t the only one assisting the work in this community. A church came from California to help SDRF construct the wooden walking bridge from the mainland to the dock, where fishermen tote cages from the ocean. I was in awe of how hard the team must have worked, calculating when the high and low-tides were so it could work at the best conditions and then laid down the complicated maze of pipes in the ocean that connect to the nursery. Each little plank and pipe was so significant and necessary, just as much as the hands that fit each one together.

After another short drive through more forests of palm trees and cliffs over the emerald ocean, we came to the only pre-school on the island, a home away from home to more than 100 children.

But since it was Ramadan on our visit, and many people in the south of Thailand are Muslim, the students were not there. But there were workers constructing the rest of the pre-school. The friendly, welcoming school was built partly by another church in CA that partnered with SDRF after the island community told SDRF another one of its needs—a preschool. The islanders were not left out of the project, but are doing their part by finishing up the school after SDRF helped start it up.

The next stop was the Marine Research Institute, MRI. I loved riding the motorboat out to the fish farm in the middle of the ocean where a fisherman guided us as we walked on wobbly planks that surrounded wire-mesh cages floating in the water. The fisherman reminded me of a worker at Sea World when he coaxed the variety of fish to the surface by holding out a small bait just above the water.

Watching these plump fish flopping around, I felt awe to be part of such a mission. I had never dreamed in my life I would in any way shape or form be linked to genetically modifying groupers to weigh 72 pounds, or be a member of one of the first companies to experiment on how to harvest lobster, or be part of the patient process of mining pearls, but I am.

On the way home back to Bangkok I was thinking about how blessed I am, but also how if anyone thinks about it, how blessed we all are. We live in a world where we are all connected, so by doing our jobs the best we can, essentially we are helping others far beyond our near-sighted eyes can see.

I just hope everyday working at Asoke Tower at Elite Prep I can put on my far-sighted lenses, so my vision will always stay clear.