When I stepped off the plane into the Bangkok airport, I was expecting to start another fantastic program with Rustic Pathways. I was expecting a summer trip, just like other OVS students who this past summer visited places such as Vietnam, Guatemala, and Honduras.
I was expecting to spend two weeks with my friend-since-kindergarten, Max Doyen, the chairman of Rustic Pathways, David Venning, and various new faces in Thailand and Burma.
I was not expecting, however, to have the greatest, happiest, and most life changing two weeks of my life so far.
It was my third summer spent with Rustic Pathways. The previous two summers I had helped the endangered turtle population of Costa Rica thrive, and also worked and cared for the pandas at the Wolong Panda Conservation Center in Ya’an, China.
This summer, the summer of 2012, was my first working with the intent to help people, not animals.
It was the greatest opportunity I have ever been given.
Over those two weeks I, alongside 13 other high school students, interviewed more than thirty people to learn what life was like for our peers growing up and living in various tribal areas throughout Southeast Asia. We interviewed refugees from a Karen tribe on the border of Burma, we interviewed a monk-turned-prostitute – a wonderful man who did what he had to do to take care of his family – and we interviewed the most animated monk – and man – I had ever seen.
I travelled through Thailand with the most extraordinary group of teenagers I have ever met, spoke with people who were exceptionally wise and kind hearted, and experienced the happiest times of my life so far.
I did not realize how life changing this experience was for me until the very last night of our trip.
We were in Udon Thani, Thailand, at the Rustic Pathways Rice Field Base. The Rice Field Base is host to many of the programs offered in Thailand by Rustic, and there were a large amount of teenagers there, celebrating their last night in Thailand with a large, loud, and ludicrous dance.
It was fun at first. It was fun to dance with my friends and to play with the local children who had wandered over to the bonfire at the base. But the longer it went on, the more ridiculous it seemed to me.
Here we were, in one of the most stunning places I have ever seen, on the last night we would be there for who-knows-how-long, and we were celebrating everything that this place was not.
We were not celebrating the people, or the place, but ourselves.
We were not celebrating the animated Monk Goosodeeka, who once told us, with both wisdom and laughter, “You are all young and healthy and beautiful right now, but everyone is the same, and one day you will all look like monkeys.”
We were not celebrating the opportunity that was given to us by the chairman of this company, David Venning, who taught us, “The value of the people comes from the heart of the people. Everything else is of no lasting value.”
We were selfishly celebrating in honor of ourselves, and not in honor of everything that we have been privileged to experience, and that has shaped us to be who we are today.
So, instead of dancing with these strangers, I went to the front of the base, lay back in the grass, and had a conversation with a friend I’ve had since 1999. We spoke about life and dreams and the future, and it was then that my life changed.
Lying in the grass with an old friend, good conversation, and a cloudy and starry Thai night, I realized more about myself than I ever had before.
I used to want to act, or to edit novels, but now all I want to do is help, experience, and live. I want to spend my time living my own life, not acting out or editing someone else’s.
I have never been more grateful for an experience. I have never been more grateful for Rustic Pathways, for my mother who encouraged and funded my travel, for my school, for my life, and for every opportunity I have ever been given.
Because it was my time in Thailand and Burma, interviewing my tribal peers, having phenomenal conversations with new and old friends, teaching simple English words and phrases to new Burmese Rustic staff members, and being so, uncontrollably and truly happy, that completely changed my life.
Story by Aria Ellett, Class of 2013
Photos contributed by Anne Driscoll and Alec Martinez