Published at 16:08, Tuesday, 07 August 2012

A DEPRIVED Asian community has benefited from the hard work of a group of intrepid Furness sixth-formers.

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The first-year students from Barrow Sixth Form College and Ulverston Victoria High School visited the village of Ban Doi Mod.

The area, around one-and-a-half hours from Chaing Mai in the far north of Thailand, is far removed from the tourist resorts of the south.

The villagers are ethnic minority hill tribe people who do not consider themselves Thai and have their own language and culture.

The main project was to build communal bathroom units on to four homes in a bid to improve sanitation and reduce infant deaths.

By the end, the students, along with the hard working villagers, had built a further three bathrooms, a concrete bridge over a river, and a covered slab on which villagers could slaughter pigs.

They also renovated the school library, provided new plumbing for the school toilets, donated a large collection of equipment for the nursery, and organised a school sports day.

The students – who paid for the trip themselves and had a fundraising drive to help fund the project work – travelled with Malcolm Halsey, head of geography and geology at B6FC, and Jeanette Halsey, head of chemistry at UVHS.

Mr Halsey said: “A key part of the trip is that the students are able to integrate with the local community.

“This is an experience which is a real privilege and something you can’t book at a travel agent.

“We always find that these communities can teach us so much about life and we try and have open minds when we arrive.”

The students lived in pairs with different families in homes made of bamboo on stilts.

The village, of 120 people, was part of the Lahu tribe and its inhabitants were proud of their culture and traditions – practicing an animist religion, based on the existence of non-human spiritual beings.

The students ate together with a local named Louie and his family, eating various stir fries and noodles with vegetables, pork and chicken with spicy pickles.

Mr Halsey said: “Jeanette and I were incredibly proud of the students for the work they did, the conditions they coped with, and the impression they gave the villagers of the western world.

“It has given them something to measure and evaluate their own life against.”

The students from UVHS were: Lucy Baldwin, Rebecca Sankey, Meghan Hallatt, Eleanor Wright, Henry Moss, Chris Littlechild, George Walker, James Robertson and Lisa Foy.

Jessica Mullen, Megan Griffiths, Rose Yates, Eve Mulholland, Katrina Taylor, Danny Shaw and James Willis represented Barrow Sixth Form College.

Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk