A New Volunteer's Experience in Mae Sot

Motorcyclists, open-air vegetable markets, men kicking rattan balls high into the air, rain storms with a vengeance, goats eating people's flowers, and more dogs than you could ever imagine. These are just some initial impressions since my friend Christina and I arrived in Mae Sot about five days ago, a place that is already beginning to feel like home. We are two engineering students from Stanford University, born and raised in the US, and on a great, green adventure for the next three months. I first heard of BGET when I was performing research for my senior thesis at Bard College back in 2005. I was a physics major, but I wanted to apply the knowledge I had accrued to something practical, something worthwhile. I wanted to "save the world", so to speak.

So I chose to look into possibly building a micro hydropower system on my campus, a project that dramatically changed my professional goals. One day, looking for some reading material on micro hydropower case studies, I came across BGET's website and immediately felt I had found something special. I had been to Burma a couple of times with a volunteer group I had helped to form at Bard. We called ourselves the Children's Expressive Arts project and schlepped bags and bags of paints, paper, and myriads of other fun stuff to dozens of orphanages around Yangon and Mandalay, teaching for about four or five hours at each location and then, as quickly as we came, leaving with nothing but a mountain of art supplies in our wake. Who knows if what we did made a lasting impression on the children or caregivers of these orphanages, though what we did was an incredibly meaningful experience that I will treasure forever. I wanted to go back there and help more, and here was an opportunity to use my expertise to create positive, immediate, and lasting changes in people's lives. There were challenges to face, stories to share, and I wanted to be there.

It wasn't until my first year of grad school at Stanford that I heard about some fellowship opportunities with a company called MAP Royalty, which acquires and manages renewable energy royalty interests primarily associated with wind power. Looking at the list, I was delighted to find BGET as one of the internships and immediately began working on writing the best application I could. So that's how I got here, in this northern Thailand border town of about 150,000 people, depending on who you ask. Every weekday, Christina and I leave our cozy guest house and bike down the busy streets (on the left side) to the BGET office, arriving at 8am. We've been working on helping to size a couple of up-coming micro hydropower systems, which involves lots of spreadsheet calculations. We'll be installing one of these systems in November. For our project with the Global Health Assistance Program, we're also looking at some coolers that will be powered by solar to cool vaccines for Malaria, Japanese Encephalitis, Dysentery, etc. And on Saturday, we worked on building three solar water heating systems for homes in Mae Sot. We'll finish those next Saturday. And just in time for the rainy season to end!

Thanks for reading my post. Stay tuned for more!