3 days in...

Thus far, OPC's been interesting. It's always neat to see how something's grown organically, but also as an outsider, to see its faults. On Saturday, we went to interview some of the students who are receiving scholarships from the BRP/OPC collaboration. These are all Burmese refugee children, all of whom are either orphans, from broken homes, or single parent homes. We met two boys, who are ethnically Shan, but were carried over the border when they were younger. Both are in Grade 9, at a local boarding school outside of MHS. We were conducting the interviews in order to send the reports back to their sponsors.
So far, education is much cheaper than in China, and what's unique about the scholarships, is that they're not 100% scholarships (needs assessments are done--some are 100%, but are atypical). The idea behind this is to encourage students to see the value in their education--because it's not a hand out. They have to work for additional funding (which can be done as labor with the organization or a lot of the students work in the garlic fields during their holidays to make up the difference). It seems to be working. In any case, the poor children were petrified of us farang (foreigners) with our laptops asking innocuous questions like "so what's your favorite subject?, what do you want to be when you get older?". As dire as their situation is (some of these kids are here on special visas that don't really provide them with the option to legally work in Thailand), they remain optimistic, which is awesome.
Another girl we interviewed, is currently at the equivalent of Jr. College, studying accounting, and is taking care of her younger siblings, and hoping to be an accountant. For her, she was really concerned whether or not if she wanted to pursue a 4 year degree (and she does) whether or not we would be able to find funding to subsidize her studies.
Today, we took a 2 hour drive up to the burmese border (we couldn't cross) to meet with the KMT village. Apparently, there are a lot of former KMT soldiers living in the hills of Thailand as they tried to escape the communists.
We then met with a small, poor Shan community (elderly) that the project director of OPC tries to help. Unfortunately, it was a classic case of how not to manage a relationship. The root of which, lies in the cultural and communication barriers between people. OPC provided pigs to the community in the hopes of them raising the piggies, selling them, etc, and ensuring a livelihood. Instead, the community ate the pigs, and were now asking for more pigs/money. This is the struggle of NGO's - how to gain population participation and get them to see the long-term, big picture of self-sustainability, versus that of immediate gains. Sadly, this problem exists in ALL types of organizations.
Which is why the scholarship part of the organization seems to do so well. It actually makes the student 'own' a part of their education. Now, if we can just teach them that pigs don't grow on trees....