Project Intensive Thailand: Real Adventure, Real Help

Focus: Community Development and Public Health
Location: Mae Pung, Phrao District, Chiang Mai Province
Dates: October 22 to November 5, 2008
Language: English and Thai
Housing: Aomdoi Resort
Program Fee: $3,000

Have you longed to go on a real adventure, share real camaraderie and have real fun while providing real help to real people with real problems and learning real skills? Would you like to form lasting friendships with people on the far side of the world, create lasting change in poor villages and enjoy lasting memories of a vacation like no other you have ever imagined?

Then join Global PACT and public health volunteers in Mae Pung, Thailand, to develop solutions to community health problems!

Global PACT: Accomplish the Impossible!

This fall, Global PACT will take a team of 15 Americans to Mae Pung, a small “tambon” or “municipality” in Phrao District, Chiang Mai Province, one of the poorest places in northern Thailand. The American team will partner with a team of 15 local village volunteer public health workers. With only four professionals and more than 100 villages to cover, the tambon Public Health Office depends almost entirely upon these local volunteers 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 per team. 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 the program finishes.

Work Hard, Play Hard

Global PACT trainings are not all work and no play. The extraordinary natural beauty of northern Thailand will take your breath away -- receding ranges of misty mountains, golden green rice paddies, orchids and flowering trees as far as the eye can see, and fresh fruit within hand’s reach. Besides savoring the beauty of the setting, you will have a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in a new, fascinating culture. Take doing research for your project. 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! And after you have collected information, 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!

Can I Do This?

Global PACT helps you to recognize and use the skills of a lifetime in a new and challenging setting. Your ability to manage a team, compost yard waste, do Internet research, produce a flyer, construct a budget, negotiate a contract, read and make sense of the nutritional information on food packaging, all of these skills that you take for granted can be invaluable in the field. What Global PACT does is to transport you to a distant location, introduce you to a team of extraordinary people just like you, and offer all of you together a fun and exciting, real-world, project-based training to teach you how you can change the world with what you already know.

Leave a Legacy

What are the best things that remain from a great vacation? A gentled spirit. Beautiful memories and wonderful photos. Lingering scents and flavors. Stories about talkative taxi drivers and maybe even being invited into someone's home.

What makes a trip with Global PACT truly memorable is that you will come home with all of these and so much more. After all, you will be working intimately with Thai team members to solve problems in their own villages. You will visit these villages not as tourists, but as friends. You will sit on the floor mat with a local family for dinner and take your turn with the babies and toddlers. You will sip tea together under the huge stars of the Thai heavens listening to the night birds and smelling the night blooming jasmine. It will be a story to tell the grandchildren when they are old enough!

But when you go home, what you will really hold dear is not what you bring with you, it is what you leave behind. Because what you leave behind will be a community project that will improve the quality of life in the village for years after you're gone. How many other vacations let you leave a legacy?

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 nice break for lunch in town in between. “Class” will combine group discussions led by your professor, intense sessions with your small, six-person team, and lots of presentations of your team’s ideas to the larger group. 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 observe conditions, conduct interviews, survey villagers 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. (Yes, you are likely to end up in the paper!) At the end of the day, you’re on your own. You may wish to visit with your teammates or simply to head home to the resort for dinner, a drink and a Thai massage. Whatever your desire, Global PACT vans will be available to get you there.