Jude's Story

Jude joined GVI Thailand in late 2007 as a volunteer. He loved his experience teaching in Ao Luk so much that he joined the staff team. Sadly, after a nine-month tenure he moved on to teach in China and was sorely missed. Fortunately for the people of GVI Ao Luk he returned this past expedition to run both the construction and teaching children projects. We were thrilled to have him on board and are mourning the loss now that's he's back Stateside. Below he describes his experience on GVI Thailand's Community Renovation Project.

'The two weeks on the construction project were definitely well spent. At first it was difficult to see how much of an impact we could make, especially after seeing how much work the school needed, but we were determined and were undaunted by the task at hand. Soon we realized what a wonderful position we were in. Though there were projects set out and things that needed to be done, the decisions of what to do and how to do it were completely in our hands. We spent the first two days laying out our plans and gathering our materials. The key project we had before us was the preparation of a new classroom. One of the ground floor rooms was being “used” as an abandoned store room for mostly broken furniture and spiders. This had been ear marked by GVI as a new classroom and was our main priority. We spent the rest of the first week cleaning, painting, decorating, changing hardware and bashing up bug eaten wood. It was very rewarding to step back and see the end product. The following week we teamed up with a few of the teachers at GVI and did an absolutely AMAZING mural on the back wall of an underwater landscape. It is now by far the nicest classroom at the school and to see pictures of it being taught in is very wonderful.

For the second week all of the volunteers from the other projects GVI runs here were scheduled to come down to the school and give us a hand. With the larger group we had some actual man power and decided to tackle a more heavy duty project. One of the rooms on the first floor of the school was HUGE, around 3m wide and 20m long. Honestly we could have had a descent game of hockey in there if we had a ball and sticks. We decided to build partition walls and divide it into three rooms. Electrical wires had to be moved, fans and lights had to be installed, frames built for the walls, facing board cut to size and nailed in place and the new rooms needed at least the first coat of paint on.

It was hard work, especially having to do it all with old fashion hand tools, but it was also great fun having so many people there all working together. We all did our part and all worked really hard but the atmosphere was light and friendly and I really got to know some of the other volunteers from the teaching projects that week. There were jokes and bad music, paint fights and minor accidents that made that whole week so enjoyable and though we didn’t quite finish painting the rooms I can walk away saying I helped build 3 classrooms.

All in all, it was a whole lot of work but a whole lot of fun. Thank you to every one involved.'

Jude's Story