Life in the Borderlands – Chiang Mai

Together with three students from China and Germany, I worked at the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Communities (ISAC) - an organization primarily occupied with supporting local farmers in northern Thailand to make the transition to organic agriculture. ISAC exposed us to all facets of organic farming - from cultivating our own cucumbers and beans, as well as, packing and transporting the harvest to preparing and selling the products at the organic markets. Through the help of our local guide, we conducted interviews with farmers, customers, and academic experts involved with ISAC. The interviews enabled us to contextualize the benefits and challenges of organic farming in northern Thailand and culminated into a video report.

The value of taking such a course abroad does not solely lie in its content. Supervisors, local academics, Thai NGO’s, but especially fellow students enlightened the experience in several ways. For example, the translator assigned to our group called, “Son,” brought us to the village where his family lives on the Thai-Myanmar border. Born in Thailand to a family of Shan-immigrants from Myanmar, Son is not recognized by Myanmar or the Thai state as an official citizen. As a stateless student, Son taught us about the daily joys, challenges, and frustrations, but also the opportunities that he and his family had endured when they escaped the deteriorating situation in Myanmar. These insights into local life around borders do not only feed into the content of the course directly, it helped us to put a face on contemporary issues such as migration, the human need for belonging, nationalism, and citizenship. As students, we would normally learn about these issues only from the safe distance of a classroom lecture or a case study in a textbook.

Along with three other students in the summer school course, I worked in a homeless shelter in the city of Chiang Mai. When I first arrived at this very colourful shelter in the middle of the city, it became clear that this would be a challenging, but unique experience. The Hope Foundation offers homeless people a place where they can rent a room for either a long- or short-term basis enabling them to shower and sleep safely. More importantly, however, the shelter offers a space where homeless people can meet and exchange, building a community. The Foundation is democratically organized, whereby the people living in the shelter on a long-term basis meet together regularly. Such a meeting took place when we first arrived enabling the community to decide together which tasks our group would address in the following weeks.

We spent two weeks gaining insight into the lives of homeless persons in Chiang Mai. For example, we helped sell noodles in a parking lot, we sold meatballs at night, and learned how to cook the famous Thai dish “Pad Thai”. We also collected and sorted trash. Collecting garbage was the most impactful experience for me personally. We spent an evening walking through the streets of Chiang Mai looking through garbage bags for plastic bottles that we could sell for recycling. Although we will never be able to fully experience what it means to be homeless, we were fortunate to gain insight into some of the individual life stories of the homeless and the obstacles that they face on the streets. As a final project, we created a video with the interviews of some of the people we met in the shelter

The summer school not only served as an ideal complement to the master’s programme we attend at ETH Zurich, but it led to unforgettable encounters with students from different cultures, with instructors, and, most importantly, with local people from Chiang Mai.

This video provides an impression of the programme with insights from participating students on the value of taking the course.

Alina Gäumann is a second-year Master’s degree student in the Comparative and International Studies programme at ETH Zurich. Alina works as a Re-search Assistant at the Center for Security Studies and at the International Conflict Research Group at ETH Zurich. Alina previously worked for the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Geneva, Switzerland and for Innovations for Poverty Action in Mexico City, Mexico. Alina attained her bachelor’s degree in Politi-cal Science from the University of Zurich.

Camiel Boukhaf is currently pursuing courses at the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zurich. He holds a BSc. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Amsterdam (in the Netherlands) and has been a visiting student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His primary research interest includes the politics of development with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa.