“Class dismissed,” says teacher Dan to his students, little boys and girls aged five to six from downtown Surin, Thailand. Another day has passed for this Briton whose paycheck went from six-figure Pounds in London to close-to-none as a mentor of school kids in Surin. Nevertheless, he never regretted having left his top-gun post as an advertising executive to volunteer as an English teacher. “I could see through my English teaching (that) I was doing something of a real benefit for the teachers and the children,” says Dan on an interview with Transitionsabroad.com, a website that helps foreigners finding volunteering positions abroad. Dan is just one of the tens of thousands of businessmen, employees, students, and many other people who went out of their way and homeland to help the less-fortunate through volunteering.

Communicating a better future

Dubbed as the “language of communication,” English is the most widely-spoken language in the world, with over 1.5 billion speaking it and another one billion learning it, according to the British Council. Even tourists in foreign lands can hardly ask directions or strike a conversation without knowing how to speak English since it is used in more than 100 countries. “English has become the lingua franca in many parts of the world,” notes David Crystal, a linguist at Cambridge University. “It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language in Commonwealth countries and many international organizations.”

At the dawn of today’s Information Age, even books, educational materials, the mass media, and the Internet are being transferred into English. Hence, without knowing the language, many people are feared to be left behind, even lose their access to information, and in turn, to good education, better opportunities, and progress from poverty, warns A.C. Huston in his book, Children in Poverty.

According to the United Nations, illiteracy is directly related to poverty and underdevelopment—circumstances that force millions of children to leave school and be in work conditions where they can be easily exploited. Over 860 million adults are illiterate and minors not attending school exceed 110 million globally. In Asia alone, about 900 million people or two-thirds of the developing world’s population live on a dollar-a-day budget, according to Asian Development Bank. This makes illiteracy, more so, English proficiency, a major problem in Asia.

Volunteering in Asia: How it can help

To solve Asia’s primary problems, ADB suggests an “anti-poverty strategy,” whose vital component is “investment in human and physical infrastructure” or developing Asians’ quality of life through methods like teaching English proficiency, the language that is often associated with economic growth.

In Nepal, apart from seeing the only Hindu kingdom in the world and visiting ancient Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines, many tourist stays from several weeks to several months to volunteer in schools, orphanages and monasteries. A majority of the Nepalese lives below the poverty line. “As part of a year-long traveling experience, my fiancé and I found ourselves in the Himalayan Nepalese capital of Kathmandu. Eager to experience the culture more deeply than one would merely as a tourist, we took up volunteer positions teaching English in the small town of Pharping,” writes Rebecca Gados in Transitionsabroad.

Rebecca and her fiancée, who volunteered to teach at a junior high school and in a Tibetan monastery, had applied through  www.idealist.org, an online organization which matches potential volunteers with positions across the world. “Having just traveled from Tibet, my fiancée and I were very interested in helping out the constantly growing Tibetan refugee population. Since the Chinese invasion of Tibet from 1949 to 1951, there have been thousands of Tibetan refugees in Nepal,” asserts Rebecca, who is happy that she was able to explore her creativity to make the kids’ learning experience as fun as possible.

"Volunteering to teach English also paves way for other opportunities such as getting training on cross-cultural interaction or being invited in lectures such as Dharma, meditation, Yoga, and other spiritual practices", says Dan Kaplan, a British who volunteered to teach the language in the small village of Dharamsala, Tibet.  Teaching experience is preferred but not necessary, most of the times. For a one-month commitment, it is possible to negotiate a stipend to cover basic room and board. In addition to teaching, one may also find work with one of the nongovernmental organizations, emphasizing that Western visitors are “warmly welcomed” by the locals.

There are countless of volunteering opportunities in Nepal and its neighboring Asian countries. All one needs to do is to surf the Internet. Many of the volunteer programs arranged from home can be more costly than those arranged while in Asia. Volunteer placements usually do not require advanced planning.  After completing the program, volunteers will take home more than smiles in their hearts or pictures in their memory cards. “Many of us have found out that there’s a different definition to living the high life,” says Dan.