After learning the true meaning of sabai at Satree Phangnga Secondary School in southern Thailand, I moved to Laos in July 2014 to become Plan International’s first PiA fellow. On paper, my responsibilities were to teach English language to rural staff in Bokeo Province and to collect stories for the Plan Laos Facebook page—but I was in for so much more than that.

Firsthand Observations.

I could not have dreamt of a richer immersive and educational experience. Through conversations with staff, government authorities, and visiting consultants, I learned about the immense development challenges facing rural Laos, the international aid community’s approach to combating these challenges, and the bureaucratic inadequacies within the Lao government.

Each month, I joined my coworkers on trips to rural villages and witnessed how Plan’s staff engaged with its beneficiaries when delivering services, sharing information, and collecting household data. These interactions were always full of friendliness and sympathy—but they often had a giver-receiver dynamic due to the nature of the work. Never did I hear my Plan Laos colleagues sit down with villagers and ask them openly and honestly, “What do you want? What do you need right now to improve your lives?” Asking these types of questions was not in their job description, and that seemed to be the standard with many of the organizations that I encountered.

A Surprising Problem.

After ten months in-country, I discovered that the school director and an English teacher of Nam Meng Town desperately wanted a secondary school library. I emailed NGOs working on libraries and other education projects to solicit their help, but each has its own reason for declining its services—understaffed, lack of funds, outside of their pre-determined program activities. I was shocked —how could there be no channel to help these secondary school teachers obtain something as indisputably positive as a library?

I decided I would have to make the library happen myself. I could raie all the funds for a single library on CrowdRise and ask an NGO to carry out the construction, but was that all I wanted? It sounded too much like the traditional aid approach of gifting buildings and services with no strings attached. I also did the mental math and wondered why the community did not just build a library itself. I knew people had miscellaneous funds for lottery tickets and Beer Lao, so what was stopping the community from pooling their funds and investing in a library?

SangNamGan.

After just a month of working in
Myanmar, inspired by Proximity Designs’ innovative culture, the pieces came together. What if I convinced communities to fund 50% of needed projects and then matched their contributions one-for- one? What if I could build a model more constructive and inclusive than handouts that incorporated all I knew about Lao culture? What if we could SangNamGan (create together)?