Urban Light

I really have been doing more in Thailand than just eating, I can assure you. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of beginning to volunteer with an organization called Urban Light. Started by a woman from Maryland, the organization serves as a respite center for Thai boys who are forced to work in Thailand’s booming sex industry at night. I originally typed the work “prostitute” as an explanation for the boys work, but deleted it – as even seeing it on a screen feels a little too creepy. The boys range in age from the mid-teens to early twenties. They come from the Akha village in the north, but most have been here in Chiang Mai for years. For the most part, they seem as well-adjusted and stable as any, though their lives outside the center are anything but.

The center, originally started as a tutoring program in a local coffee shop, now does a whole lot more. Urban Light provides the boys with a place to shower, a hot lunch, a way to learn English and general life skills. When the boys are sick, the staff takes them to the clinic. When the boys are really sick, they visit them at the hospital, making sure they’re receiving the best care and sending hugs from the other well-wishers. The organization provides rent for the boys who are not of-age to get a legal job, and job opportunities for the older ones. Because none of the boys can afford a private school during the day, Urban Light also provides the fee and needed encouragement for the boys to enroll in a GED program.

If this seems like a shameless plug for the organization, it isn’t – but it should be. Never before have I seen a team of people more invested in what they do. While Alezandra, the founder, fundraises in the United States, two young women named Hazel and Aw act as case managers, coordinators, and house moms all in one. When one of the boys, Ado, had a motor bike accident, Aw was dressing his wounds the same day that Hazel had made a dentist appointment for him to replace his lost tooth. Of course, Urban Light took on the bill. A few nights ago, Hazel couldn’t sleep. With a one-year-old baby in the house her sleeping patterns have been off lately. At 2:30 am she took her motorbike out for a 20 minute drive, visiting the bars that many of our boys frequent. Like any good mother, she scolded the boys for being out so late and told them to go get some sleep. They’re characters, both of them. They also happen to be unbelievably gorgeous: reason enough for a 16-year-old boy to visit the center daily.

The boys themselves are in a league of their own. They’re polite, often exceedingly so, in their attempts to humor me while I try to contribute in some meaningful way.  When they let me make lunch, I burned myself and any bystanders with splattering oil. Charlito, our best cook, quickly took the wok from my hands. When I tried to buy the boys ice cream pops from a man who had stopped in front of the center, they had beaten me to the punch and had no problem explaining that no, the brown popsicle is not chocolate, it’s brown bean. Pink is not strawberry, it’s sticky rice. And white, well, it’s not vanilla, but it’s some sort of Thai leaf. I don’t know what I’d do without them. For the record, I ended up choosing sticky rice and it wasn’t half bad… if you ignored the floating bits of rice.

They treat me like I’m slightly incompetent when it comes to navigating day-to-day life in Thailand, and they’re kind of right to assume I am. What I can offer is a command of the English language. They’re great students and through my teaching I’m able to learn about their lives in the village before they came to Chiang Mai, and their lives now. It isn’t too often that when you ask a boy to write a sentence in the past-tense he chooses “I used to ride buffalo.” Isn’t it always the case that the students end up teaching the teacher in the end? This is no exception.

Currently the center is under two feet of water due to recent flooding in the area. If you’d like to make a donation to Urban Light, please visit: http://urban-light.org/about.html