Charlotte Beskow Charity Work
Our fellow Charlotte, after 20 years of work as a space engineer, decided to take some time off and perform some charity work:
WHERE: in Thailand, more particularly in two villages: Khan Pia, a small village of roughly 200 houses in the north east of the country and Tai Miang a larger town in the south. She chose to perform her charity work in Thailand because she lived in that country during her childhood and already had notions of the language, the customs and the people she was supposed to work with. Another driving reason was the fact that Charlotte is in favour of ecotourism and believes that Thailand has a good potential for this type of activity.
WHY: to do something meaningful on a daily basis especially compared to her ESA job where a project can take many years, Charlotte also stated that she chose this type of volunteer activity because deep down she wanted to be an explorer and this was a nice way to go and visit areas outside normal touristic routes.
HOW: Charlotte found this opportunity by simply googling volunteer vacations, several results showed up, she chose one which can be found at www.openmindprojects.org and which deals with doing voluntary work in schools.
HOW MUCH: the volunteers sign up for a minimum of 4 weeks and pay their room and board, there is no maximum duration for these types of activities.
PRACTICAL ASPECTS: Charlotte gave some examples of the different daily "adventures" she found while performing her charity work: greatly varying accommodations (tent, room, bungalow with shower), food and drinks, during her stay she hat and drank what the families she was working with had, she underlined that there is a considerable difference between western habits and what she experienced in quantity, quality of food and hygienic conditions. Luckily she didn't experience any problems.
Charlotte ended her presentation, which was accompanied by beautiful pictures, by stating that she is convinced that spending an entire day teaching young children the correct pronunciation of "three", "tree", "Shoes" or "choose" is useful as it favours the communication. A better communication is the key to better knowledge of "others" and a better knowledge is at the base of a better understanding which can ultimately contribute to the reduction of conflicts.
She also stated that this type of voluntary work, in addition to saving turtle eggs in a national park, gave her the opportunity to learn about another culture in a privileged way, namely by being in contact with locals all day long.
The presentation ended with Charlotte signalling another site: www.kiwa.org which might give ideas to all of us, who maybe do not have the possibility of leaving work as she did, to contribute to projects like the one she took part in.
The talk was followed by some questions and Charlotte was thanked by Ehsan on behalf of the Club
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