Teaching in Thailand for the Holidays

Study Abroad

Jan 14

USC senior and theatre major David Mandell shared his experience volunteering in Thailand through the Alternative Break program:

By David Mandell ’15

Traveling to Thailand over winter break with a group of USC students is definitely unique winter break experience. Alternative Winter Break Thailand offers the opportunity for a small group to travel to a foreign country and teach English to children.

We worked with two schools, the first being in a much better socioeconomic situation than the second. In addition to English lessons, at the second school, we finished projects around the school (painting, building, organizing).

The majority of the group enjoyed working at the second school simply due to the genuine interest and curiosity for learning and the appreciation they had for us being there. Seeing the smiles on a daily basis not only showed the impact we had on them, but the impact they had on us. The appreciation for the small things in life gave us a new perspective and new understanding.

We would split up into small groups and each group would teach a class. Oftentimes, we would have stations so the class groups would rotate between the volunteers. This made it effective for us to hone our teaching techniques and gave us time to perfect our lessons.

However many times we would repeat words, we sometimes felt that the repetition did not provide a true understanding for the language. There were discouraging moments where it did feel we were not making much of an impact and made us question the overall implications of “voluntourism."

But then we realized that we are only there a few weeks and we work with a program that has volunteers year-round. We are just a link in the chain. Regardless of how much we actually "did” and the significance of the impact we left, I know on a personal level that we left an impact on the lives of those children, and they left an impact on me.

Everyone from USC took their holiday vacation and decided to spend it without any family, without friends, without any luxury and put themselves out there. We did get to enjoy some of tourist attractions in Thailand, like seeing incredible temples, beautiful hikes, unforgettable elephant riding and playing in the river and non-stop shopping and eating at the night market.