The University of Wisconsin Stevens Point is providing a scholarship opportunity for possibly 4 students from our organization to study as undergraduate students next fall. This opportunity is extended even for those here without citizenship. In fact, it is intended for those without citizenship because an education abroad would hopefully make one more eligible for status. I remember when this project was proposed to me last year over a dinner. It was by a university student in his late twenties and frankly, I brushed the whole idea off as preposterous, thinking this guy’s idea demonstrated a real superficial understanding of immigration law and fund raising.

Apparently however, I was wrong and I was the one with the superficial understanding of how to get around the red tape in migration. It actually looks like this is going to happen, if enough money comes in for it. Strings were pulled and now it seems like permission and maybe sufficient funds will be granted to a couple of our graduate daughters who lack citizenship to study abroad in the States. The tricky part would now be, picking who those girls are who are confident, motivated and goal oriented enough to benefit from a scholarship opportunity like this. In other words, some are going to be selected from an application process and some are going to be flat out rejected from this opportunity.

I would have loved to disassociate myself from this process entirely. In fact, I was pretty much sure I would have nothing to do with it until the director of the organization told me I would be administrating the English interview with the new foreign volunteers just yesterday morning. “It won’t be a problem,” She said, “none of them are your students” obviously, seeing how my oldest student would have been 14 years old. Our assessment on their performance will weigh heavily upon their being accepted or rejected from this scholarship opportunity to study in the states. This sucked. At the same time, we were told their proficiency in English would only be 10% of the overall evaluation. The first year of their stay in the States would include exclusively ESL classes for the students and they could begin their college level courses after a year. So I pretty much figured, it’s not that big a deal if they simply couldn’t give some of their answers in English.

The interview process went like this: Three volunteers sat on one side of a table while one by one, young women would come to interview for 10 minutes. The new volunteer would administer the questions because he doesn’t speak Thai yet and he couldn’t even pretend to understand anything other than English. Communication difficulties were supposed to be remedied by having a quasi proficient Thai speakers to assist with linguistic difficulties. They’d be able to answer the question “What is your name” but then once “How do you spell that?” came about, their faces would panic and turn to me for guidance. Then the meat of the questions would come like, “Why do you want to go to America?” and “Out of the following three, what is the most important and what is the least: money, love, work?” Sometimes they would understand these questions but almost every one of them turned to me and said at one point, “Can I speak in Thai now?” and then we’d have to respond “Try giving an answer in English first and then if you want to add more and feel that you can’t do so in Thai, you can use Thai.”

So take, for example, the answer to “Why do you want to study English?” Most students had approximately one sentence answers that took more than 2 minutes to spit out. One girl would say, “…..Beekaw…..I wans too learn spik goot Engliss.” Translation English to English, “Because I want to speak English well.” Then, after saying that, she turned to me and gave a 2 minute tangent about her real reasons for wanting to study in the states, but in Thai. I can’t remember verbatim what she said, but here’s the gist of it, “I want to study at University in the United States because I want to master a proficiency in English to come back here and use that skill to give back to this organization. I need to give back to this organization because it has done so much for me and it has saved me from much hardship and it has given me a childhood. As an organization that deals in cross border trafficking, we need more English speakers to communicate with international organizations and to participate in conferences.” But then the director of the organization overheard this part of the non English tangent and interrupted the interview, “Just a reminder, this is supposed to be an English interview" she said. The director looked mad at me because all I was supposed to allow each interviewee to do was ask me for vocabulary words. I wasn’t supposed to interpret for the non Thai speaker in the room and I was supposed to stop the interviewees from answering their questions in Thai. The first girl that was interviewed just looked so paralyzed by not being able to express herself in English, she even started tearing up a little bit. How could we possibly tell her we wouldn’t accept her response in any way she could give it to us?

If I never mentioned this in any entry before, very few people in this part of Thailand actually speak a word of English. Sure, they might have had English in school for 10 years, but they still might not understand you when you ask them, “How are you?” A lot of it has to do with lack of colonization. A lot of it has to do with the fact that in this part of the country there simply are not westerners breaking down the doors to get here. A lot of it has to do with the fact that for so many people, hill tribe languages are the native language and Thai is a second language and then English is a distant third. I have never thought of anyone in this program as unintelligent and yes, I always kick myself for not finding ways of making members of this community more comfortable using English. Mostly, the stinging feeling of the week was having to hand in a set of documents to the director and deliver my own assessment of who was “the most worthy and most qualified” to go to the United States over anyone else. I don’t want any of them to get rejected. I’m sure in some way shape or form, their hearts are set on this opportunity and it's not like any of them are not "worthy" of an experience like this.