Helping the Akha Students

I have been visiting Laos off and on for the last six years. First as a tourist then as a teacher. This last visit was as a tourist as I had planned to just visit some friends. When covid hit like a sudden wave and in a sense of global panic and uncertainty they closed the borders. I have been in Laos for almost two years now. I’ve attempted to make the best of it by joining a school and teaching the students English (My masters is in teaching English). Then Covid subsided and I thought things would get back to normal when it returned and they shut down my school.

Sometimes the best way to find purpose is to help others. I collected donations from my Facebook friends in September of 2021. I also used about a hundred dollars of my own money and decided to bring supplies to a small Akha village in Meaung District. Getting up the mountain wasn’t easy as our truck broke down just 45 minutes outside of Houayxai. The trip would normally take about 4 hours ended up taking more than 9.

We were able to with just a few hundred dollars provide clean drinking water delivery for a year for one school. We also were able to buy them notebooks, pencils, pens and paper for the classroom. Several children didn’t have the school uniform so we bought them winter and summer uniforms and a pair of shoes so they didn’t have to walk barefoot. In addition we provided some food for some of the homes that did not have any. We provided them some noodles, eggs, milk for drinking and canned milk for cooking.

The children were really excited because we also donated three soccer balls and 2 volleyballs as well. They were really cute. The families got wind that I was coming and had each of the kids donate some vegetables to share with me. We gave those to the teacher to help people as needed.

We spent sometime walking around and exploring the area trying to enjoy the local food and take in the local culture. It was a bit more reserved because people were scared of foreigners due to covid so we kept our distance it wasn’t like my last visit up here. We then learned there was another outbreak of Covid in Houayxai and they were going to close the roads to the mountains. The next morning we hurried and negotiated transportation and found ourselves on the last truck going down the mountain.

We managed to get down the check points and back to Houayxai just in time for them to close all the roads in and out. It was then I got a call from my friends in Meaung District. That one of the fathers of a young boy we helped had brought us a squirrel. He wanted to say thank you for taking care of his boy. It made me cry to think of someone giving up their meal for the day. Be grateful friends let’s do what we can to help those around us.