On my family’s recent three-month trip to Asia, we decided to volunteer in a city called Luang Prabang on the Mekong River in the north of Laos. At first when my mom told me we were doing child care as volunteers, I thought it wouldn’t be fun. I thought it would be like teaching, where you stand at a board and point at stuff, but when I started, it was actually fun.
We volunteered for three weeks. At first we signed up for only two weeks, but my sister Anais and I wanted to do three weeks, so three it was.
We rode over every morning from the guest house where we stayed with other volunteers in a tuk-tuk, which was like a little truck open in the back with seats. It was fun. I liked the wind.
We weren’t pushed to do anything. Mostly we just played with the kids. It felt like a playdate with one of my friends. Even though they didn’t speak English, or very little, it was still fun. We didn’t have to understand them.
After a couple of days of volunteering, I met a girl named Aling. She was the cutest and sweetest girl I ever met. I think she was three years old, because she was next to the classroom for four-year-olds and was smaller than the four-year-olds and because there were two classrooms for three-year-olds.
I want to explain how the classroom looked. It was small, on the floor were foam tiles that fit together like big puzzle pieces, and once a week they pulled them all out and washed them then left them in the sun to dry.
The wall in the classroom was dirty with drawing marks and there were posters with different things, like vegetables including cauliflower, turnip and tomato, or fruit like mango, papaya and orange, and also the A-B-Cs. The kids always wanted me to carry them or lift them up. They would point at something on the wall and I would have to say what it was, like different animals or different letters of the alphabet.
All the kids were really nice and really sweet and they were really smart. The four-year-olds were doing math that I sometimes do and I’m in fifth grade and they’re in kindergarten or preschool. They did like 384 plus 126 and even harder math problems than that. We also helped the four-year-olds to write letters in the A-B-C. They were really good at that, too. But they really wanted to learn. They paid attention. They were quiet. Whatever it took to learn.
Whenever I came in the classroom, the kids would run up to me and say, “Coco! Coco! Coco!” Or they would say “Mama! Mama! Mama!” Their voices were sort of funny, but cute, especially Aling. She would use expressions like, “All done” or “I said ‘No.'”
We also had dance parties inside the classroom. Most of the songs I knew, like “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” or “APT,” the song with “kissy face” in there. The kids loudly sang aloud to the music. It was funny and cute.
My least favorite part of volunteering was helping the kids brush their teeth outside in the yard and feeding them.
For the teeth brushing, we just had to give them toothpaste and dry their faces afterwards, but they would spit on the dirt floor and it turned almost white, there was so much toothpaste on the floor.
The feeding was similar. Sometimes we fed the kids, but mostly we blew on the food so that it was less hot and they could eat it. The four-year-olds could blow on their own food, but not the younger ones. I usually helped Aling. What I didn’t like about the feeding was the food was usually mushy rice soup and it smelled kind of bad. The kids ate so slow, you had to sit there for half an hour doing nothing.
Our last day at the school, we brought gifts for the teachers and grapes for the kids and they were really happy. They were giant grapes, as big as a baby’s fist or bigger, and the kids stuffed them into their cheeks and laughed.
If any families out there are going to Laos, or Asia, or anywhere else, I recommend volunteering for child care. It’s a good family experience. You have to work, but you learn and it’s fun.
