Greeting From Thailand And Our Volunteer Filip!

Sharing another great experience from the EUROASIA project!
As one of the volunteers from Macedonia who took part in EUROASIA project Filip dedicates his time and volunteering services at the Thaksin University and The Institute for Southern Thai Studies.
We are super glad to share with you his story and experience from his amazing journey in Thailand!

Being a volunteer in Thailand means being part of the whole system and country. In my case  I was placed in the educational and cultural sector. My services as a volunteer are divided into two parts and two institutions. At the same time I am volunteer at the Thaksin University and at The Institute for Southern Thai Studies/ Folklore Museum of South Thailand.

Mondays and Tuesdays are reserved for my volunteering at the Museum. Every morning we have different tasks, and I like the diversity and the dynamics of them. We have days when we need to translate materials, from articles related to the museum work and artifacts documents. We worked on a video and audio promotion of the museum, as well as on transcription of videos.

As part of my responsibilities was also to attend and to visit various cultural events, afterwards to write an article about my experience on those events. Once we helped the restorers to clean and maintain artifacts in the museum, which was pretty interesting.

All these activities and tasks lead us to knowing more about the museum and how this institution works, in order to prepare ourselves to be guides for tourist or students groups and professors that visited the museum, they were from Malaysia and Indonesia.

My other half of the volunteering experience was at Thaksin University. I was volunteering there every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. My main task was to teach and speak on English with the students, to motivate and encourage them to use the English language more, to exchange experiences for our countries and professions.

This part of the work for me was much more complicated and challenging. Most of the student’s didn’t even speak or understand English, or their knowledge was on a very basic level. Some of them were even afraid of us (the volunteers) and tried to avoid us as much as they could, because they didn’t want to face a foreigner who will speak to them on English. However, there were also students who spoke or tried to speak and communicate with us, even if they didn’t know the language good they give their best in order to connect with us.

At the end, a lot of students eventually got rid of their fears and began to communicate with us in hard-to-understand English, which was I would say in any case a big progress.

For me I would say that the most interesting and the most prolific thing during the volunteering service were the lessons and lecturers that I had with the students from the graphic design department. Although we had a language barrier, together with these students we found a common language that unites us, that was the language of art and design.

At the end I would say that, this kind of projects and volunteering experiences can only bring positive impact and can be life changing.  This is one of the most unique and amazing experiences that happened to me so far.