What will I do - or can I do this?
Global PACT Project Intensives are limited to fifteen American participants paired with fifteen local participants. The other American participants are like you, adult professionals from all fields, some working, some retired. The local participants are village health volunteers working for the Mae Pung Public Health Clinic. They are in their mid 40s and 50s, generally lack much formal education, but have received basic public health training during monthly meetings at the Public Health Clinic. They are proud of their contribution to their communities, which, while poor, are happy and stable. (In Mae Pung, a tambon or “municipality” made up of many villages, per-capita incomes for the poorest half of the population run from $0.50 to $1.00 per day, or roughly the Thai poverty rate to double that rate, although $1.00 per day is less than one half of what is needed to provide basic necessities.)
On the first day of the program, we will begin by getting to know each other. We will use verbal and nonverbal icebreakers to loosen up and to get used to life in translation. (What you will immediately observe is that you are often laughing before the translation, because so much communication is intuitive. You will soon be a master of nonverbal communication and sign language!) Once you are warmed up, we will brainstorm problems confronting our communities – yours and theirs – and categorize them. You will be amazed to discover that there’s not a serious problem that you confront in your community that doesn’t have its analog in theirs and vice versa. Collectively, you will then winnow down the issues that you have identified to select the five issues to which the thirty of you want to devote yourselves. Finally, following your personal preferences we will divide you into the teams in which you will work for the rest of the program. There will be five teams of six – three Americans and three Thais on each team – one team per issue, with translation help available for each group.
In this dry description of our first morning together, you have learned one of the most important, distinguishing characteristics of a Global PACT program: it is driven entirely by the interests of participants. Global PACT does not pre-select projects, prime the pump or otherwise interfere in the process. A Global PACT program is yours to define, according to your interests, your knowledge and your skills. Together, you and your Thai team members will select and develop a project of your own.
This, of course, raises the obvious question: “Can I do this? What do I have to contribute?” Yes, a lot. Here’s how and why.
In the same way that the issue each Global PACT team pursues represents a fusion of team members' interests, the team’s capacity to carry out the project reflects the fusion of the team members' diverse knowledge and skills. You are complete strangers to the Hill Tribe villages of Mae Pung. Whatever expertise you may have, your knowledge and skills are worthless without your Thai partners. They speak Thai – and Akha or Hmong or Lisau or Lisu. They understand how to get things done in the villages. They know the headmen, the enthusiasts and the nay-sayers. They know where to go for the statistics you will need; they can conduct the interviews and the surveys. Without them, you are a clueless volunteer vacationer able only to engage in physical labor.
This isn’t a one way street. Whatever local expertise your Thai partners may have is worthless without your knowledge and skills. You have literally made a living solving problems – breaking them down, researching the options, identifying the necessary resources, building budgets, and implementing. This isn’t something that you have done only at work; these are skills you have honed in years of everything from organizing church fund raisers to creating your own nonprofit to stop an offensive development in your town. Without these skills, the problems you will tackle in the villages would simply go on festering as they have for years.
What Global PACT does is to produce fusion in the same sense as in nuclear physics. We slam you together, and from the resulting collision a brand new element is created and a huge amount of energy is released. In a successful group, it is not just what they bring and what you bring to the party. It is not even that together you collectively have more skills than you have individually. The magic of fusion is that in a successful group something wholly new is produced. You will leave transformed by what you have seen and done. Your experience and research in the villages will inform how you see and analyze the world. Likewise, the legacy of civic knowledge and skills you leave behind will shape how your Thai partners think about every problem to confront their communities. Still more importantly, the essential habits of the heart that they have learned from you, that basic notion that each of us bears personal responsibility for our community, will change the very way they think about their communities. And that is not only entirely new, it is hugely powerful.
