Florence's summer teaching and living with Burmese refugee students at the Parami Learning Centre in
Mae Sot/Mae Pa as Global Art Exhibit's 2009 Thailand Summer Intern.
On the weekends when they are free, Min Lwin and Kyaw Myint will take a projector, laptop, and speakers over to the new campus for movie nights.I piled into the truck with the kids boarding at the old campus, we drove over, and after rearranging the mats and benches in one of the kindergarten classrooms, commenced to watch the Lion King with English subtitles.It was 8:40 at night, pitch black outside, and I was in no condition to stay awake after the Scar-playing-with-mouse scene.I foolishly reclined and pretty soon was dozing off to the amusement of the students.
Aye Chan Aung, one of the boarders who goes to the nearby high school, asked me to give her an English name.For some reason, I first thought of Isabelle, which would have been my name if it wasn’t Florence (I much prefer Florence.In retrospect, it was pretty thoughtless of me to try to give her my reject name.)She looked reluctant, so I suggested Elizabeth (after the queen!), but it seemed difficult for her to remember the name, which I took as a bad sign.By the time we got to the scene where Scar leads Simba into the dried canyon, I finally figured it out: Alice.
“What do you think?” I asked.She smiled and agreed that she liked it.
I checked out for most of the rest of the movie, collected a couple more mosquito bites, and came to in time for the credits.Nothing like the Lion King for some good weekend entertainment.
Florence is a third-year university student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Neurobiology at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. In December, after weeks of scouring volunteer opportunities, she found the Global Art Exhibit and fell in love with its fusion of art, humanitarian work, and ambition to enhance global education. As a summer intern for the Global Art Exhibit, she was assigned to Thailand for 7 weeks and Hong Kong for 3. Thanks to the generosity of the Fung Foundation Scholarship, she is able to volunteer her time (not to mention pay for airfare!). She is currently in Mae Sot, Thailand teaching science classes in English to Burmese refugee students (most of the Karen ethnic minority), and is boarding at the school campus along with the principal's family, the office staff, the female boarding students, and some other teachers.
Florence is having the time of her life.
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