by Braun, Adam
Three days later we were on our way to Pha Theung to attend the groundbreaking ceremony. As I bounced around the back of a gray, beat-up pickup, flanked by two men from the district education ministry, I wished so badly that just one of my friends or family could be by my side. Regardless of how much confidence I tried to project, I was twenty-five, and I still craved the comforts of camaraderie.
When we arrived, the location of the future walls had been outlined with strings, and the entire community was preparing for the big moment when we’d break ground on the build site. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been speaking about this in New York for months, but to see it with my own eyes was incredible. Men, women, and young boys carried long wooden planks and gravel to the schoolyard, determined to show their dedication. When I saw two elderly grandmothers carrying a wooden plank, I rushed over to tell them that they could hurt themselves, but they smiled and shooed me away. They said something in Lao. TC told me, “They say they’ve been waiting their whole lives for this. You can try to stop them, but I wouldn’t if I were you!” He laughed.
Eventually the children, parents, teachers, and education ministry officials all gathered for the groundbreaking ceremony. They placed a large spike in one corner, and the nai ban (village chief) hammered it down with force. A flurry of activity began, and within an hour the wooden planks were nailed down in place of the string outlines and the school construction was fully under way.
The education ministry had only begun to include preschools in the national education agenda within the last fifteen years, which meant that children ages three to six in most Lao villages still had no access to classrooms or teachers. Although the ministry had a strong supply of trained teachers, neither they nor the villages had the funds to build the classrooms in which children could learn.
PoP agreed to fund the construction costs for a large one-room preschool with bathrooms in Pha Theung, but only if 10 percent or more of the total project was funded by the village itself through contributions of raw materials and physical labor. This would ensure their sense of ownership, and more important, it would increase their commitment to sending their kids to the school once it opened. The education ministry agreed to provide a trained teacher and take the school under its supportive jurisdiction as well. This partnership between organizations, local government, and the village would continue to work together to support the school long term, providing school supplies, teacher salaries, and ongoing evaluations.
I recognized a few of the kids I had met in the bamboo hut several months earlier, but I was particularly ecstatic to see Can-tong, the first girl who wrote her name with me on the chalkboard. She was still incredibly shy, and if I looked in her direction, she would hide behind her giggling friends. I vowed to win her over eventually, but knew it would take time. I didn’t mind; I planned to visit Pha Theung every day to help with the school construction until my Laos visa expired in a month. Then I would travel for ten weeks through several other countries in Southeast Asia, until returning to Laos at the start of July to see the school construction completed.
We spent the rest of the afternoon eating delicious fish caught from the river, playing games with the excited children, and witnessing the school come to life. I had pictured this day for months, but it was far more powerful than anything I could have anticipated. I thought of my grandfathers, who had journeyed across foreign lands, just as I was doing now. I thought of my grandmothers, who had dedicated so much of themselves to their children and grandchildren, just as the women carrying those planks had as well.
As we drove back to town, I pulled on my sunglasses and looked out the window, hoping the others in the car wouldn’t notice the tears streaming down my face. This school, my dream, was happening right in front of me.
* * *
The next two weeks were busy with getting the school off the ground—literally. Each morning at the guesthouse, a Lao woman in her late twenties, Lanoy, would offer me breakfast with a cheery smile. Her job was to do the laundry and change the bedsheets, but she had learned from the guesthouse owners to speak perfect English, and she had enough moxie to practice with the travelers that passed through. After chatting with her about my day’s plans, I’d ride my motorbike an hour to Pha Theung to play with the kids and check in on the school’s progress, twisting through valleys and over bridges, blasting the Rolling Stones and the Raconteurs the whole way.
I spent the mornings digging ditches, carrying bricks, and laying cement with the laborers, and the afternoons playing games and swimming in the river with the children. The routine became so normal that as soon as the children finished lunch and received their afternoon break, they would grab my hand to run down the hill behind the schoolyard, squealing with delight and pushing their siblings into the warm, shallow waters. Some days I’d race a group of ten-year-old boys out to a large rock jutting from the river, and on other afternoons they would take me fishing using handmade nets in an old wooden canoe.
As I floated in the river I often wondered, What are my friends doing at this very moment? They were at swanky parties or sitting in important meetings with important people, and I was in the mountains swimming and playing Duck, Duck, Goose. I couldn’t have been happier with my choice. It was the simplest life I’d ever known, and the most fulfilling too.
One afternoon, while waiting for some older kids to get out of class in their makeshift school, I sat under a tree writing in my journal. When I heard soft voices murmuring over my shoulder, I turned around to the sight of three young girls. They were covered in dirt and wearing tattered clothes, with no one looking after them at all. For some reason I decided to record a quick video, so I turned on my camera and asked them, “Jao seu nyang?” What’s your name?
“Nuth,” replied the first one, sinking her face behind folded hands. When I asked the other two for their names, Nuth instinctively perked up and answered on their behalf. Her two adorable friends, Tamund and Nith, stood beside her eagerly smiling. I then panned the camera around the schoolyard, showing the three-room primary school, the bamboo hut, and the site where our first school—a preschool for children ages three to five—was under way. As I swung the camera back toward them, I was struck by a sudden realization.
“And you’re going to be our first preschool students?” I asked. Once again, I figured the first step toward this becoming a reality was to verbalize it aloud. Although they didn’t know a word of English, all three giggled with a sense of understanding. “Sounds good?” I asked, and they laughed again with delight. The moment perfectly captured the beauty and innocence of these young girls that our school would educate. It also demonstrated the interconnectedness that we all share as a global humanity, regardless of whether we look the same or speak the same language.
That night I posted the clip on Facebook, tagging every person who had worked so hard to contribute toward that first school. I was determined to make PoP as transparent as possible by showing people that their donations, regardless of size, were going to change lives in a profound way.
When I woke up the next morning, I saw that the response to the video was overwhelming. Overnight I had received emails, messages, and comments from friends and strangers alike. All of them wanted to get involved. The school was no longer just about my personal desire to thank Ma for her sacrifices. It was now about these three little girls and the countless others we could impact if we started a broader movement.
* * *
A friend soon connected me by email to Bob Anderson, the founder of Community Learning International, an organization that built community learning centers, libraries, and schools in Luang Prabang Province. We met for dinner one night along the banks of the Mekong, and Bob explained that he had been living in Laos for more than a decade. His knowledge of the country, people, and NGO space was impressive.
“How much do you pay for a classroom?” asked Bob.
“We work in partnership with the education ministry and a partner organization, so they provid
e us with a detailed budget, and then we pay them to hire the contractor,” I said. “The school under construction is one large room and a bathroom, and after the village contributes more than ten percent of the cost, we pay about fifteen thousand dollars.”
“We build school classrooms for ten thousand dollars.”
I couldn’t believe it. How were they able to do it for $5,000 less?
Bob explained that his organization had a local architect on staff, Somlath, and that after they received government approval for all of their builds, money never left their organization except to pay salaries and buy building materials directly from the wholesalers at local prices. They bypassed contracting companies by doing all the work themselves. I didn’t even know that was possible.
When Bob offered to have his architect, Somlath, take me to visit several villages they were scouting for potential sites, I jumped on the opportunity. “I want you to see Phayong village in particular,” Bob said. “We’ve wanted to work there for years but currently lack the funds.”
Days later I was bouncing around the back of a tuk-tuk with Somlath, headed four hours north to Phayong. He explained that during the rainy season from June to September, mudslides washed away the dirt road that careened around the hairpin mountainside, making Phayong completely inaccessible to the outside world. At several points on our nail-biting journey toward the village, we had to hop out of the tuk-tuk to push it up a hill. We pushed with all of our strength, hoping our extra force would will the vehicle onward and not leave us stranded in the wilderness. Thankfully, it worked and we arrived just before sunset.
The entire village was made up of bamboo huts with no electricity. Children roamed naked, and mothers carried babies in slings on their backs. Half of Phayong’s more than five hundred inhabitants were ethnic Hmong and the other half were Khmu. Although they lived and farmed side by side, they could not communicate because they spoke different languages. The only chance for a unified future was through education. At the center of the village stood a small one-room structure with decaying wooden bars and a rusted corrugated-tin roof.
“They use this as their school,” Somlath said.
“For which grade?” I asked.
“All grades. This is all they have, so they only teach children from ages ten to twelve. They have been requesting a school for fourteen years here.”
As I shook my head in disbelief, a young boy walked past us. Somlath began chatting with him in the local dialect, then turned back to me. “He is eight years old. The younger children can’t go to school here because they have no classrooms or teachers, so he cannot read or write his own name.”
“Ask him, if he could have anything in the world, what would he want?”
Somlath listened and translated, “He would like to go to school, Mr. AB.”
Sometimes you know something in your head, and other times you know it in your heart. The mind delivers logic and reason, but the heart is where faith resides. In moments of uncertainty, when you must choose between two paths, allowing yourself to be overcome by either the fear of failure or the dimly lit light of possibility, immerse yourself in the life you would be most proud to live.
I had had no idea what would happen when I’d arrived in Laos that month. I hadn’t known whether the MOU ceremony would be successful, whether we would truly break ground on our first school, or if I could share any of it with our supporters back home. But I had faith that it would work out, and that faith gave me the confidence to speak the language of the person I wanted to one day become. The more we speak in the voice of our most aspirational self, the closer we pull our future into our present. That’s what compelled me to put $25 into a bank account, brought Nuth, Nith, and Tamund into my life, and carried me on a broken-down tuk-tuk across towering mountains into a village that desperately needed a school for its most vulnerable young people.
We stayed in a shabby bamboo hut in Phayong that night, resting on hard mats, listening to dogs bark at the shimmering moon. Since arriving in Laos, I’d slept pretty well, but that night I was wide-awake. I was already envisioning the second Pencils of Promise school.
Mantra 12
WALK WITH A PURPOSE
After nearly a month, the foundation was laid on our first school and my visa was approaching expiration, so I left to explore the surrounding countries for several months before returning to see the school’s completion. They say, “Not all who wander are lost,” and my travels now took on a distinct purpose. I was eager to learn from locals and NGOs in the surrounding areas. I started in a remote part of southern Laos referred to as the Four Thousand Islands. On the island of Don Det, a Frenchman who worked for a health-based organization invited me on an adventure to a remote village one afternoon. He would be accompanying an elderly Lao woman, who was returning to her home after being away for more than forty years.
We spent the following day hiking eight hours across rice fields that few eyes had ever seen. When we arrived, we were greeted at the village with local delicacies, such as duck-blood soup and rice whiskey, and plenty of Lao dancing, but the journey there was even more memorable. We drank delicious freshwater straight from a river, marveled at the brightest rainbow I’d ever seen, and learned that when one family in a village decides to build a new home, the community as a collective participates in the project. That one conversation triggered the idea for what would become PoP’s Promise Committees, cohorts of four mothers and four fathers that we organized to oversee the development of each school we built.
After a week in the Four Thousand Islands, I met up with a friend and traveled south. We visited the floating village of Brunei (the largest in the world), where we noticed tiny boats filled with young children in matching white uniforms. A mother standing along the dock pointed to one of the vessels and explained, “School bus!” Seeing that, I realized that finding safe transportation is something many parents must consider when deciding whether to send their child to school; this consideration would factor in when PoP later launched scholarship programs. In addition to providing a backpack, uniform, school supplies, and exam fees, we decided to cover the cost of safe transportation as well.
In Bali, I visited David Booth, a brilliant British civil engineer who founded an NGO called the East Bali Poverty Project. He shared a series of documents outlining his entire methodology and approach, and I spent time with his team studying their education, nutrition, and agricultural programs. I was incredibly impressed by David’s ability to train a team of men and women from Indonesia to lead all operations. Many Western organizations never transition leadership into local hands, which in my eyes demonstrated a lack of commitment to long-term sustainability. After spending time with David, I vowed to find my first local staff member when I returned to Laos.
On my last morning in Bali, I awoke with my shirt drenched in a cold sweat. Excruciating pain racked my entire body. Something was very, very wrong. Was it dehydration, dengue fever, or something else? I had no time to find out because I had to fly to Bangkok in three hours to make a connecting flight to Kathmandu, where I would meet my dad, who was flying in for two weeks of hiking in Nepal. Apart from my work in Laos, trekking the Himalayas with my dad was going to be the highlight of my four-month-long trip. We had talked about it for years, and there was no way I could miss it.
Delirious, I took a taxi to the airport, and after arriving in Bangkok, I had to walk through the thermal-image scanner that was set up at customs to detect anyone who had an elevated temperature. I set off the machine right away. Two men from airport security escorted me to a quarantined area where they took my temperature. I had a fever of 103.4 degrees Fahrenheit. They immediately placed a Michael Jackson–style mask over my mouth and told me that I would be placed in the hospital for a week of tests. I can’t spend the next week in a Thai hospital, I thought. I had to make my connecting flight to meet my dad.
“I’m fine, just a small headache,” I said. “Nothing is wrong.”
“No, something i
s wrong,” said a Thai security officer with a stern face.
“I need to leave.”
“No, you need to go to the hospital. Go to the nurse waiting for you in the corner.”
Joel Puac had once instructed me to always walk with a purpose. If you look like you know what you are doing, people will assume the same. I walked straight up to the nurse, looked her in the eyes, and said confidently, “You’re supposed to sign this form so I can leave.” She looked around for secondary approval, but no one was nearby. I kept my eyes fixed directly on hers, hoping that my poker face wouldn’t give away the biggest bluff I’d ever tried to pull off.
It worked: she signed the form and I quickly slipped out without anyone’s noticing. I bolted through immigration, grabbed my bag, and jetted out of the airport toward the Silver Gold Garden, a cheap hotel nearby, in hopes that a night’s rest would kick-start a recovery. Shivering and with a cold towel on my head, I emailed my dad, I’ll need to see a doctor as soon as I land, but I’ll see you at the airport in Nepal.
* * *
After I arrived in Kathmandu, I was bedridden for several days. Eventually my fever broke, and I managed to do about half the trek, but I felt awful the entire time. Fortunately, my dad tended to me as never before, barely leaving my bedside. I guess those with hard exteriors sometimes have the softest interiors.
