Final Report 

After 6 months my chapter in Thailand has come to an end. In less than 4 weeks Thai will turn into German, smiles will turn into poker faces, fried rice will turn into mashed potatoes and my new life will turn into my old one. I don’t even know where to start putting all the experiences I had, things that I did and emotions that I’ve felt into one nutshell but I’ll try to give you an overview.

First of all I have to say that this chapter was one of the most changing, challenging, and hardest but on the other side also the best in my life. I had lots of ups and lots of downs that often changed within one day. I’ve learned so much about myself and how to handle challenging situations and therefore I can be so proud of myself and of how much I grew over the past 6 months. Even if I’ll go earlier than I’ve planned I wouldn’t have changed anything about my decision and I’m so thankful for all the positive takeaways the past months brought me. 

One thing is that I’ve really enjoyed being a teacher. All the smiles I’ve received, all the, hello teachers”, all the ah’s and, ohhhs” when the students finally understood a difficult topic, made it already worth it. I think about becoming a teacher myself now and I see teachers themselves out of a different perspective. How much work they have to handle, how patient they have to be but also how much joy they must feel working together with the kids. 

I also made friends for a lifetime. I and the other volunteers got along super well and basically did and experienced everything together. I also made kind of friendships with the kids even if there was a huge language barrier which stopped me from building a deeper connection. I still spent lots of time with the students, no matter if it was yapping, helping with homework or baking Christmas cookies together. The best connection I’ve probably built was with the boys from the school volleyball team which I was able to join. The training was always something I was really looking forward to and I’ve experienced such great support and team spirit even though we didn’t speak the same language. It also helped me a lot to feel less different in a crowd full of Thai people than usual, all of us being connected through our passion for volleyball. The thing I will definitely miss the most is the students with their openness but still very respectful manner.

At the beginning of my volunteer year, I was wondering how and if people really can change that much in such a short amount of time, but now I’ve realized: that I probably did the same. I’m scared that I won’t fit into my old life” in Germany anymore, because I grew too much meanwhile there almost everything stayed the same. The main thing I’ve learned is to just do things alone. I came here alone and I will go back all by myself. I travelled by myself, I went to the hospital by myself while having an infection. I took several buses by myself across the whole country. In the beginning, I thought I was lonely but I was just alone, there’s a difference. And once I’ve accepted being all by myself I started to see all the positive things coming with that. I’ve seen the raw version of myself when nobody else was looking. I’ve experienced the freedom of doing whatever I wanted to do because nobody cared. I had a chance to find out what I wanted from my life and got even better at building new connections because I had to. All those learnings I made without even trying. Even if a lot of things went wrong. I would never change anything about my decision and where I am now.