There’s a lot to be said about volunteer positions that keep people involved in projects for long periods of time. For some people, the perks are a bit of a nebulous spiritual thing. For me, a big part of it is not feeling like a machine in a temp agency or someone’s pawn in retail. It feels nice to have a sense of purpose other than to make cash. And I’m lucky I’m working in one of the cheapest places in the world and that I don’t have any financial concerns to tend to at home. The community we service here, the kids and the undocumented minorities make everything totally worth it.

There are moments, however, where I want to pack up my bags and leave for good, and it has nothing to do with the kids or students here.

8 months ago I came into this organization with a really small teaching schedule and handful of administrative assignments that required going onto the internet. There was one computer in our office and back then, it took the homepage on average 5 minutes to download. Getting extensive research done took forever, so quite often, I’d leave the site during the day to go to an internet café where I’d get things done a lot faster. One hour costs about 40 baht ($1US), so I could never exactly break bank by doing this, even if I did it frequently. Nevertheless, it seemed weird that so much of my day was spent off site and it seemed weird that I should be paying an internet café to get research done for my volunteer work.

So I had pressed this issue at the centre where I presented all of the reasons why we should invest in a more modern form of internet access. And they were reluctant to do so, seeing how they managed to exist all these years without any sophisticated internet, why would they need to start now? And after all, they’re non-profit and they can’t spend on anything that might be considered frivolous. But I had been given assignments to find names and contact information of 40 international organizations in south east Asia. I knew they wanted this information sooner rather than later, so I offered to pay for internet service out of pocket for the 6 month term that I was meant to be here. It would only be about $25 per month, and it would facilitate a lot of other people’s work in the office.

Once the offer was given to them, they were quick to install better internet access. In the same month, an incredibly generous donation of 30 new computers came in from a combination of sponsors from America and Spain. This was meant for the community learning centre, for people who have never had the chance to even turn on a computer in their life time. Internet Access was also installed in that room so they could learn to do searches as well. For whatever reason, I was never presented a bill for this upgrade. Until last Friday.

In a very smiley, Thai way, Chulai found me from the accounting office while I was sitting with a few of my students giving extra help and she said right in front of them, “This month’s phone bill is 1,200 baht, do you have the money for it?” I stared at her blankly because I had no idea what she was talking about and then she reminded me, “I have this memo here saying you’d take care of the internet bills during your term here.” This felt like a slap in the face.

A lot has happened since January. I’ve helped raised public awareness on the issues of human trafficking and migration issues of this region. I’ve inspired a good number people to donate upwards of thousands of dollars to support our programs through correspondences in emails and by hosting the foreign visitors we have. They depend on the foreign volunteers to represent the organization because none of the staff feels comfortable enough with their English to talk about what we do. I’ve also learned enough Thai that they’ve felt comfortable with me writing reports for our sponsors on activities on workshops that were conducted without a word of English. These are just a few of the things that have happened between now and then. And that was a really long time ago.

It took me a few seconds to say to her, “You know, I had made that offer 8 months ago, not yesterday….and I when I made that offer, I was supposed to have left in June.” And she said, “I know, I’m sorry, I forgot but now I’ve remembered.” And she just sortof waited for me to fork over the cash in front of my students. It apparently had been dealt with all this time without anyone asking any questions and without anyone wondering where we would get the funds for it. That phone bill, by the way, while it’s still only a bit more than $25, is about as much as any of my students’ families make in three weeks and I was embarrassed to have been asked for the money in front of them.

It’s not an enormous amount of money, but that’s not really the point. I never wanted anyone to tell me thank you for volunteering for so long. And if I ever felt like I was doing bad work, I would have left already. It would have been different if they had asked me to pay the first bill in February and then again in March and so on. But after all this time? For whatever reason, justified or not, I went home that day feeling bitter and wanting to quit. It made me forget why I was here at all.