Development, Thailand and Tikkun Olam

By Max Chaiken
Brown University

From the KOACH-ON-CAMPUS archives...

This past January I spent 10 days in Songalia, Thailand on a program with American Jewish World Service and Brown Hillel. Even though it has been more than six weeks since I returned to America, it is still very difficult to describe the sights, sounds, events, places and people that created and sustained our experience in Thailand. The breadth and depth of our experience makes it such that in many ways, one needs to have been there to understand. Instead of trying to relate the trip or the experience as a whole, it seems far more fitting to pin-point individual moments. My mother always used to tell me that "God is in the details." My experience in Thailand helped me truly understand what that means.

My prior assumptions of what I would experience were thrown out the window as soon as our group landed in Thailand. Throughout the six hour drive from Bangkok to Songalia, our driver, Thorn (pronounce tone) was laughing, joking and smiling in as much English as we knew Thai (read: very, very little). At 28, he had lived in Thailand nearly all his life. He was close to moving to Indonesia once, but decided against it when his father threatened to disown him. He has a daughter, but she lives with his wife, from whom he is separated. He says that his wife doesn't think he does anything valuable. He works primarily as an AIDS educator. He goes to local communities and teaches children in schools what AIDS is and how they can prevent it. When I asked him why his wife doesn't value that work, he either didn't know or didn't understand what I was asking him. Our conversations were always brief and punctuated by laughter, smiles and the occasional cigarette. Yet somehow, even without a common language or a common experience we shared a connection.

On one of the last days of our trip, Thorn took our group on a raft-ride through the river near where we were staying. Our bamboo rafts were very long and supposedly could hold between three and five people. But somehow, my friend Einat and I got into a raft that was broken and almost sinking. So while the others moseyed down the stream, barely touching the water, we were sitting half-submerged on a raft that could hardly hold our weight. We were trying to stand up and hold our balance and steer the raft. What a sight we must have been, two terrified Americans falling off of a bamboo raft while attempting to steer ourselves and not to break our necks in the process. We were falling and laughing and sopping wet, and every Thai we passed laughed with us. Somehow, we knew that it would all work out.

The last experience that I want to describe is of a dinner that we ate with a Mon family. Because it is on the border with Burma, Songalia has a large number of Burmese refugees. While the whole situation is extremely complicated and would take far too long to describe here, suffice it to say that there are thousands upon thousands of Burmese refugees living in the region who have no state, no jobs, no one common language and few, if any, means of generating income. One of these families, a Mon family, agreed to host us for dinner one night. After we arrived, took off our shoes and sat down, we asked if we could help, thinking that we were being polite. Insulted, the mother said to our translator "Of course not! You're guests!" So we simply sat and tried to make conversation speaking through our translator. We learned about their family, their history in Burma and their struggles. We also ate a delicious meal and even when we thought we couldn't eat any more, we did anyway because the last thing we wanted was to leave food on our plates. We were blessed to have a true exchange with a family that we previously wouldn’t have even known existed.

We knew going into the trip that we would be working with an NGO. We knew that we would be doing manual labor and interacting with community members. We thought we knew why. Our primary task was to work with a Thai NGO called Pattanarak. Pattanarak works in several regions of the country to help communities assess and meet their own needs.

We went to Thailand with the arrogant assumption that somehow we would be helping the people we met. Naturally this assumes that they needed some kind of help. In reality, when we tried to lay bricks for the trash incinerator that we were helping to build, the members of the community giggled and did the same work twice as quickly and more effectively than we did. Once we arrived and upon returning, we struggled greatly to redefine why we had gone. Does this community need our help? Could we help them even if they did? Are they truly "poor" or "unhappy?" How can we care about the greater issue of development when we don't know what it means? How can we prevent ourselves from being consumed by these questions, resulting in inaction and apathy?

We struggled with these questions so much that we began to joke about it: we didn't even know how to simply lay bricks and mortar for a trash incinerator or how to steer a bamboo raft: How could anything we do make a difference? But at some point it dawned on me. We had been asking the wrong questions. We can't ask what kind of greater societal impact we are making, because when we realize the challenges of development and our social responsibility, we will feel like ants standing next to giants. I realized that the answer was right in front of us, staring at us from the pages of Pirkei Avot. "Lo alekha ha'melakhah ligmor, v'lo atah ben horin l'hibatel mimenah," meaning it is not our duty to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. Essentially, we have to care. We have to do something to try to affect the greater cause of social change. But simultaneously, we have to prevent ourselves from being consumed by it and to realize our human limitations. We have to value the process of repairing the world, Tikkun Olam, as a process that has value as an ends in itself – not just as a means to a greater ends. Our driver Thorn taught me this. A bamboo raft taught me this. A dinner with a Mon family whose name I don't even know taught me this. Pirkei Avot, too, taught me this. When we ask the right question, our faith and traditions often help us find an answer.

[Re-posted 07/15/07, originally posted 03/20/07]