Photo by haribote

When I made the decision to leave Japan and start a new life in Thailand, I was a tad wary. I knew from the plethora of English-teaching opportunities in the land of the rising sun that one’s experience can vary greatly, and, more often than not, it’s best to get a sense of the people and the teaching environment before you sign your soul over to a contract.

Enter the NGOs. I wanted a way to learn about Thai culture, get away from touristy areas like Bangkok and the major cities, see how the kids behaved, and above all, experience Thailand without the pressure of paperwork or a huge time commitment if I found something to be amiss.

Thai Mueang Volunteers

Thai Mueang Volunteers was founded by a Dane after he spent some time in Phang-nga Province helping with tsunami relief. Employed in a Thai primary school at the time, he noted the low English level of the students and the lack of preparation other volunteers exhibited, as if they were fresh off the bus from Bangkok.

And so a volunteer organization was born, setting up shop in the small town of Thai Mueang, two kilometers from the nearest beach and in a prime position to give aid to under-funded government schools in the area that would not otherwise see any native English speakers.

Volunteers are given support from staff for every aspect of their life in Thailand, most notably lesson preparation.

Photo by René Ehrhardt

Opportunity Overview

A month or a week. Six months or a year. The choice is yours. The organization is very flexible in terms of time commitment and starting date. However, no one should adopt a “come as you please” attitude to schools in Thai Mueang; if you want to volunteer, expect to spent at least four to five days a week teaching regular classes, all of which require lesson plans and your presence.

Volunteers are asked to donate 400 Euros for one month of service (discounts apply the longer you stay). In exchange, housing, food, transportation, and Thai language lessons are provided. Be warned: If you would prefer not to ride on the back of a motorcycle, you might have a difficult time making the commute to neighboring schools and towns (although a car will be arranged for your pickup from Phuket International Airport).

For a typical day in the life of a TM Volunteer, click here.

Ideal Volunteer Profile

Photo by Mr Huevo

“Open-minded people who are not afraid of coming out of the ordinary, the safety of their homes… who come wanting to do this, not just as a holiday.”

Voluntourists beware. There is fun to be had, but your focus should be on the needs of children… some are too poor to afford pencils and papers for class. People interested in getting trained for TEFL certification are most welcome, and your classes in Phuket will be accommodated.

Do you genuinely like teaching, and knowing you have something to offer that most of these kids have never seen before? Sign up!

Advice for TM Volunteers

• Learn about the culture. Thailand is not just Phuket and Bangkok. This out-of-the-way corner is the perfect area to acclimate.
• Let Thai students understand where English comes from. Remember you’re more than their teacher, you may be their first contact with American, British, or other English-speaking culture.
• You’re living in the middle of a rubber tree forest, a short ride to an unspoiled beach area. Incidentally, a Filipino serves some great wood-burning stove pizza right on the sand.

One Volunteer’s Experience

I was escorting a few students back to the school after morning services at Wat Patchatikaram. It’s hard to describe, but in those few minutes of travel, there was complete clarity between us. A young girl picked up a flower, presented it to me as a gift, and, although I couldn’t understand her words, my mind didn’t have to struggle to understand her message.

I could read her expression and the reaction of her friends as clearly as looking through crystal. No, I don’t have a girlfriend… yes, we give flowers as gifts too… yes, I think you’re pretty.

Even though they were my brightest and best-behaved class, I had failed to remember that although they were Thai students I could barely comprehend at times, they’re just kids. Young adults thinking the same thoughts, going through the same feelings as those anywhere else in the world.

I took the flower with me as a far as Kou Tao, where I left it in my bungalow. I kept the memory, though.

For more information

• Thai-mueang-volunteers on Matador.
• Thai-mueang-volunteers website
• Thai-mueang-volunteers blog

Photo: StormeTX

I work for a Canadian non-governmental organization in Guatemala, high up in the mountains of Comitancillo, San Marcos.

According to the Human Development Index, Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Americas, and has one of the worst rates of literacy, maternal mortality, and unemployment.

Canada ranks fourth.

Guatemala ranks 118th.

While Comitancillo is the poorest municipality of Guatemala, the women with whom I work are radiant and strong. A few weeks ago we went to a nearby village to participate in the closing ceremony of one of our leadership classes. I met one of the most empowered women I have ever known, a bright and motivated mother of 12 children, 10 of whom are living.

Meeting Cleofa

Photo: L.S. Doron

Cleofa has been receiving non-formal education classes for the past eight months. While not everyone in her class has learned as much as she, Cleofa is a model of change in her community.

She told me that her husband said if he couldn’t attend the classes, which are run for only women, then she should go and learn as much as she could about health and cleanliness, sexuality and menstruation, and human rights.

She told me women have rights to participate, to speak out, and that she tries to share these messages with her family and neighbours. Cleofa said the important thing isn’t just to listen and talk, but to do.

Change comes through action, she said.

Looking around the mud house in which the class is led, I saw many brilliant, hopeful women.

They had been arduously saving what little money they could scrape together for the last eight months as part of the class, and were about to have their savings matched by my organization. The 1000 quetzales (about $150 USD) they were about to receive was probably the most cash they had ever had at one time.

But looking around the house at their beautiful smiling faces, I also saw signs of intense malnutrition in the women and their children. Cracked, dry skin, bloodshot eyes, discoloured hair.

And I remembered that this is one of the poorest villages in the poorest municipality of one of the poorest countries in the world.

Malnutrition is a huge problem in these communities. Access to potable water is extremely limited. People don’t have access to the food they need and even if they had access to it, they wouldn’t afford to buy it.

While many of the people in this community dedicate their lives to growing nutritional foods like brussels sprouts, their produce all gets imported to the United States and Canada.

Making Conscious Choices

Photo: AIDG

In the city, we sometimes get disconnected from the food we eat. It is easy to forget where our clothes come from.

But no matter how many water projects we do and how many savings matches we hand out, until we are ready to pay what our clothes and food are worth, these communities will continue to live in poverty.

So here is my holiday message to you: don’t buy things you don´t need, and think about what is behind everything you think about buying. Chances are those shoes or that purse or those jeans were made by small children in Asia.

Chances are the food you are buying was grown by farmers who weren’t paid enough for their produce to buy food for their family, let alone a holiday dinner.

Buy fair trade.

Fair trade ensures that the people on the production side are being paid a fair wage. Fair trade products sometimes cost more. But the reason they cost more is because someone in a completely different part of the world was actually paid for their work in the creation of this product.

Check out stores like Ten Thousand Villages or your local fair trade shops. We won’t save the world by buying fair trade, and far greater change is necessary, but if the movement picks up, larger companies will eventually have to start paying workers a fair wage.

Consumer pressure has forced all kinds of multinationals to go green. Consumer pressure could also force multinationals to go ethical.

It’s not a lot to ask. As Cleofa said, change comes through action.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

If you’re interested in learning more about where your clothes come from, check out Matador member Kelsey Timmerman’s book, Where am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes.

The Frutwangler Glacier, Tanzania. Photo by appenz

From the poles to the tropics, these ancient and monumental glaciers are going fast. Their disappearance will have drastic consequences for our planet.

Furtwangler Glacier, Tanzania

Photo by twocentsworth

The once impressive ice field atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, will soon be a thing of the past. In the last 100 years, over 80% of the glacier has disappeared, and estimates put its swan song somewhere between 2010 and 2020.

If you ever want to lay eyes on the famed “snows of Kilimanjaro,” you’d better go now.

Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland

Photo above by Jo Simon

Covering an area of 120 square kilometers, this is the largest glacier in the Alps. Although it’s only retreated 2.6 kilometers since 1880, 30% of that reduction has occurred in the past 25 years, with an average pace of 50 meters per year.

The good news is that the Aletsch Glacier should still be around next century. The bad news has to do with moraines, large lakes of glacial meltwater trapped behind dams of ice. When the dams melt to the point of breaking, the released water can cause tremendous flooding, already a problem in the Alps.

Glacier National Park, Montana, USA

Photo above by jurek d

Count tourism among the victims of global warming. Of the 150 or so glaciers documented in Glacier National Park in the mid-1800s, fewer than 30 remain today. What’s more, climate models foretell that by the year 2030, they will vanish completely.

The region’s inherent beauty and geological importance are hard to diminish, but will Glacier National Park maintain the same draw if it has no glaciers to call its own?

Columbia Glacier, Alaska, USA

Photo by zrim

This massive tidewater glacier stretches for 50 kilometers from Alaska’s Chugach Mountains to Prince William Sound. Since 1980, it has retreated 15 kilometers, and scientists predict another 15 kilometers will be lost over the next decade and a half before equilibrium is reestablished.

As the glacier retracts, icebergs are discharged into Prince William Sound. While they are an impressive sight, these floating hazards threaten shipping lanes and may have played an indirect role in the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets

Photo above by giladr

Combined, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica account for 99% of the planet’s glacial ice. Needless to say, what happens to these sheets affects the entire world, and news in recent years hasn’t been encouraging.

Both have dumped massive amounts of ice into the ocean, with the high-profile loss of Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002 attracting global attention and bringing the question of climate change to the forefront.

Photo above by tgraham

More ice in the oceans means rising sea levels, and with the current rates of melting, we can expect an increase of about 5 mm per year and as much as a meter total by the end of the century.

Already, low-lying Pacific Island nations like Tuvalu are feeling the effects, watching as their land is slowly consumed by the sea.

Qori Kalis Glacier, Peru

Qori Kalis is the main glacial outlet of Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap, the largest tropical body of ice in the world.

Having seen a reduction in area of 20% in just 30 years, the entire ice cap is now shrinking at alarming rates, and Qori Kalis is leading the retreat at 155 meters per year.

Given that millions in the region rely on water from the glacier for hydroelectricity, crop irrigation, and drinking water, it would be a serious disaster should Qori Kalis go the way of Chacaltaya, a glacier in neighboring Bolivia that’s expected to melt into oblivion in the next five years or so.

Gangotri Glacier, India

Photo above by huggy47

One of the largest glaciers in the mighty Himalayas, the Gangotri is being watched closely by climatologists.

As the primary source for the Ganges River, on which 500 million people in India and Bangladesh depend for freshwater, its continued existence is vital.

Unfortunately, increased global temperatures have spurred its rate of retreat to 30 meters per year in recent decades, and the ice fields of the Himalayas are among the fastest receding in the world.

Tasman Glacier, New Zealand

New Zealand, epic destination for the outdoor enthusiast, isn’t immune to glacial retreat.

The relatively low altitude (730 meters) of the Tasman Glacier, the country’s largest, means it’s been hit hard by global warming. Each year, Tasman loses 180 meters.

As of now, skiing the Tasman is still marketed as “the definitive New Zealand alpine adventure.” Will it be in a few decades? Many glaciologists think not.

Photo above by awiemuc

O’Higgins Glacier, Chile

The outlook in Patagonia is grim, with many scientists pointing to glaciers in this region as the fastest receding in the world.

Chile’s O’Higgins Glacier, located in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park and one of the primary bodies in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, is no exception, having lost 8 kilometers during the last 40 years.

Photo above by vtveen

Community Connection

Want to help save the glaciers? Here’s a good starting point.

For a from the ground perspective Chile’s shrinking glaciers, check out Matador managing editor Julie Schwietert-Collazo’s recent post, Global Warming Is Real.

Feature photo by Julien Harneis

I sat down with Pam Mandel of Nerd’s Eye View to discuss her latest venture, Passports With a Purpose.

Pam Mandel of Nerd’s Eye View
Photo above by WGBH

She, along with three other Seattle-based travel bloggers – Beth Whitman of Wanderlust and Lipstick, Michelle Duffy of Wandermom, and Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby founded the nonprofit as a way for travel bloggers to raise donations for Heifer Project International, an organization dedicated to ending poverty and world hunger worldwide.

So, what was the inspiration for this? Was a sort of syncretism between you guys or more of a bolt out of the blue?

The four of us get together for coffee on a semi regular basis. We talk about blogging and travel, of course, and what we’re using our blogs to do. We all have somewhat different goals, but we all live and breathe travel. As you might imagine, we have a lot to talk about.

How did the idea of a travel-blogger fundraiser come into being?

Debbie mentioned she’d seen something similar done in the food blogger’s community – they raised over $90,000! We started talking about our respective networks and our potential reach. It took us a while to pick a cause – we wanted something global and something that would make a difference in the poverty we’ve all seen while traveling – and we were all excited about Heifer.

Once we’d decided what cause we were going to support, the next steps were easy. Companies we’ve worked with before wanted to give once they heard what we were doing, and the bloggers we contacted could relate to our cause.

Picking up household kits in Kibati camp.
Photo above by Julien Harneis

Was there a particular experience you had on your travels, or, if you can speak for them, the other founders that narrowed the decision down to help end world hunger and poverty?

It’s not really fair for me to speak for the others as our travel experiences have all been different. Though I do know we’ve all seen things that made our hearts break in one or a million ways.

For me, it was my travels to Cambodia earlier this year – I had to take a deep breath and pull myself together so many times and once in Phnom Penh, my husband had to take me by the hand and sit me down on a bench while I fell utterly apart from the desperation of Cambodian history.

I wanted so many times to give, but we were repeatedly faced the decision of how to do it right, how to decide where our money would make the biggest difference.

What made Heifer your final choice?

We liked Heifer because the program isn’t just a bandage; it’s a path out of poverty. Forgive the “give a man a fish” cliché, but Heifer does a great job of teaching people to fish.

We were noodling with a lot of different causes and for a while, we’d considered raising money for four different organizations, but we all had the same immediate reaction to Heifer International: “Let’s do THAT!”

Picking up household kits in Kibati campCommunal erection of a market.
Photo above by Julien Harneis

So, from what I understand, each participating blogger hosts a raffle of some nifty travel-related prize that the readers buy into at $10 a ticket through Firsgiving – and then a raffle committee will pick a winner for each site? How are you guys organizing the fundraiser?

That pretty much sums it up. We’re organizing at we go along, mostly – we haven’t done this before so almost every day we have something new to figure out.

Here’s how it’s gone so far. Once we decided we were going to go ahead and had picked our cause, we each contacted people we know who are doing travel blogging to ask for their help. This could be one (or all!) of three things – provide a raffle prize, promote the raffle, or buy raffle tickets – make a donation, really.

Between the four of us, we have an amazing amount of contacts. The travel bloggers we know are generous and social – the support has been amazing – and we’ve had some really generous sponsors give us wonderful prizes. Once a blogger or sponsor has committed their prize, we add them to the list.

Kibumba, a displaced persons camp about forty minutes north of Goma, close to the border with Rwanda.
Photo above by Julien Harneis

When the raffle sales start, you’ll go to our Firstgiving page and make a $10 donation – or more, as long as it’s in $10 increments. As part of the checkout process, you’ll specify what prize you want to be in the raffle for.

We add your name to the list for that raffle prize and then, after Christmas, the four founders will get together to draw the winners. (There may or may not be champagne.)

For the duration of the raffle, we’re also asking bloggers to help drive raffle donations by posting our widget. Firstgiving handles all the money – they issue receipts for the donation and get the proceeds to Heifer International. We get the pleasure of notifying winners and giving stuff away.

Do you guys have plans to keep Passports With a Purpose going? Can we look forward to more fundraisers in the future?

I hope so. We snagged “Passportswithpurpose.com.” And some of the bloggers who feel like they’re too small to pitch in or don’t have the reach have already asked if they can join us next year. (You’re not too small. You should see my stats before you say you’re too small to me!)

But we’d like to get through this one successfully before we decide what’s next. We are absolutely asking ourselves and each other “What’s next!?” but first, we have some fundraising to do.

Workers in a warehouse create kits containing blankets, tarpaulins, sleeping mats, cooking sets and soap.
Photo above by Julien Harneis

Want to learn more or enter your own travel blog? Click here
or here.

Community Connection

The Matador Team has put together a super secret prize pack for the Passports With a Purpose raffle! Make sure to buy your ticket before the Dec. 30 deadline and you could be the winner of some awesome travel goodness.