Thailand

Global PACT: Project Intensives

This fall, Global PACT will take a team of fifteen Americans to Mae Pung, a small “tambon” (municipality) in Phrao District, Chiang Mai Province, one of the poorest regions in Northern Thailand. The American team will join with a team of fifteen local volunteer health workers. (With only four professionals and more than 100 villages to cover, the tambon Public Health Office depends almost entirely upon these local women who travel by foot and motorbike to the most remote villages to provide the only health services most villagers receive.) 

The thirty participants will be divided into five teams of six –three Americans and three Thais. Over ten days, a Global PACT professor and senior trainer, assisted by the chief public health officer, will lead everyone through the challenging but exhilarating Global PACT training. At the end of the training, each group will have produced a complete project plan for a public health initiative to be implemented with Global PACT supplied funds in the months after your program finishes.

A Typical Day

A typical day starts with breakfast on the porch of the Aomdoi Resort among orchids and humming birds. At 8:30 the vans will take you down to the Warm Heart Training Center. There you will spend six hours with your Global PACT team -- three in the morning and three in the afternoon with a break for lunch in town in between. “Class” will combine group discussions led by your professor, intense collaboration sessions with your small, six person work team, followed by group presentations. At every point, your interactions with your team members will be facilitated by friendly, bi-lingual Global PACT trainers. As your project progresses, you and your team members will head out to the villages to make observations, conduct interviews, compile surveys, and collect  data. On the final day of your training, each team will present its project to villagers and local dignitaries including village headmen, other public health officers, local government officials, and the press. At the end of the day, you’re on your own. You may wish to visit with your teammates or simply to head back to the Aomdoi for dinner, a drink and a Thai massage.  

Work Hard, Play Hard

Global PACT participants work hard and play hard. Even if you leave aside the extraordinary beauty of the setting – receding ranges of misty mountains, golden green rice paddies, orchids and flowering trees as far as the eye can see, fresh fruit within hand’s reach – we think that you are going to find things to like about this program. Take doing research. In college you didn’t think it was much fun. But we guarantee that when you go into a Hill Tribe village with your team to collect data, you will be received like no tourist has ever been received! Besides, we are sure that after you have collected all the surveys, there will still be time to admire intricate weaving and perhaps learn how to make coconut sticky rice with sweet mango. And, of course, in the middle of the training Global PACT has planned two days of excursions for everyone that will amaze even the Thai participants!

Excursions