I have spent the last week getting to know the boys and staff at Urban Light.  I can’t help but compare the teenage boys I have met in the center to my students back in San Francisco.  Both show insecurities when approached and giggle when you turn on their favorite song.  Both have pressures from their families and strut around in skinny jeans.  Both tackle each other and thrive in competitive relay races.  Both flirt with girls and eat everything you put on the kitchen table.  The striking difference about these boys though is that each night they go out to a bar in the Night Market and are exploited by pedophiles who in many cases plan their vacations around this brand of tourism.  It seems like the anti-sex trafficking movement is one of the “in” things to care about as an American, but coming to Urban Light and actually seeing with my very own eyes these beautiful children and contrasting their playful spirits with the culture of the sex-touristed Night Market turns this problem into something more personal.

Today Alex (founder of Urban Light), Hazel (Case Manager and translator), and Chatree (Teen Educator) took the boys and volunteers to a nearby lake for a field trip.  We stopped at a market to buy sticky rice, papaya salad and roasted chicken and brought the lunch to this beautiful gazebo on a lake.  We forgot plates and utensils so everyone just grabbed the food and ate with their hands.  Ironically, the Americans were messier with their food than 10 essentially homeless teenage boys.  After lunch and eating some of the sweetest mango I have ever tasted, Farida and I set up an impromptu painting lesson.  Drawing on my experience teaching roomfuls of impatient and inattentive kids how to draw and paint, I quickly organized a directive that would hopefully give the kids just enough information to be successful but not inundate them with too many details.  We started observing the landscape and drew the foreground (waterline), middle ground (huts and trees), and background (distant mountains and cloudy sky).  After explaining each part I had the boys add it to their drawing.  I told them to add more details to images they wanted to appear closer and less details to make things look farther away.  They took thin sharpie markers and traced their drawings.  Next, we set up the watercolors and I taught them how to hold their brushes, use water to make different values, and how to mix some colors.  I gave some whole group instruction for this and then visited each kid and showed them tricks they could use to add details, paint realistic clouds, and mix new colors.  The paintings turned out beautifully and I was so impressed by how close attention they gave to their projects.  I could see how many of the boys tried the tricks I taught them and were successful painters as well as enjoyed the overall experience. 

Upon reflection, I can see that my role here is definitely to offer tranquil, self esteem building art experiences for these kids.  More on that later…

The first activity Farida and I signed up to do during our 3 free days before starting our volunteer project was a cooking class.  It was so much fun.  The teacher picked us up, took us to a local market to explain Thai ingredients, and brought us to the school.  At the school, we were able to choose 5 different dishes to cook and each of us had our own cooking station.  In between each dish, we would go into an air conditioned little room and eat what we just made.  They were excellent teachers and we loved every dish.  I came away with a little cook book explaining the recipes so I can cook Thai at home.  What a creative and delicious way to spend our first day in Chiang Mai :)