GVI Alumni of the Month: May

The GVI Thailand blog will now be featuring past graduates of GVI's TEFL program and other related volunteers who have gone off to do great things in the world after their experience with GVI.

Our success story for May is- Taryn Amina!

Taryn joined GVI Thailand in July 2008 to gain her 100 hour TEFL qualification and volunteer in Ao Luk. Taryn was a great volunteer to have around; aware, productive and always knows how to make people laugh.

After completing her TEFL qualification, Taryn immediately went on to work as a volunteer teaching English to Burmese refugees on the Thai/Burmese border. She spent 6 months living closely with a dedicated group of Mon hill tribe women from Burma, teaching them English, human rights, and other core academic subjects. These women plan to use their English skills to help fight for democracy in Burma which has been under military control for a number of years. Many ethnic minorities, like the Mon, are forced from their homes in Burma and live in refugee camps and border towns in Thailand.

Taryn's stay in Thailand left a strong affect on her and she returned to the US as a teacher looking for a job in a less then perfect job market. Thanks to Taryn's training with GVI and her experiences teaching in Thailand, she has been able to gain employment with the Center for New Americans in Massachusetts, teaching English to local immigrant communities. Her work will help these students adapt to a new environment and culture and gain skills that will provide them with greater chances to gain employment and succeed in the United States.

And here are some words from Taryn herself:

"It seems impossible to me that, less than a year ago, I knew almost nothing about the politics of Southeast Asia, or the ways in which teaching can be a vital force in turning those politics in favor of the people. When I joined up with Global Vision I had never before left the United States; my knowledge of other cultures came from classes, books, new programs and hearsay. But because of GVI's integrative philosophy, I was immersed in Thai culture from the second I entered the Ao Luk program -- learning enough of the language to haggle at the market, singing karaoke with our Thai neighbors until the wee hours, and creating lessons that were locally relevant to our students at the nearby free school where we were taught to teach. But I wasn't "teaching" in the traditional sense so much as I was exchanging, and this equipped me to not only teach but share a house and live among my Mon students for six months, becoming their educator, friend, liaison and, indeed, their student: I received just as many lessons from them as they did from me. And in teaching me about the problems in their communities, the students were thinking critically about the issues that impacted them, putting themselves in the best possible position to find the solutions themselves. When teaching is seen as an exchange between students with different kinds of skills and experiences, solutions can't come from the top -- they necessarily have to surface. GVI prepares its teachers to be such full-on participants in the worlds of those they teach, and it does so by teaching its teachers to be students as well."

Good luck Taryn! Thank you for all your hard work!

GVI Alumni of the Month: May