DOHA, QATAR – After final exams, most students would welcome a break from their college workload. Kicking off their summer break, however, 15 Carnegie Mellon Qatar students excitedly packed their backpacks once again for a week of physical construction work in the jungles of Thailand. These students were selected from a competitive pool of applicants to participate in the annual service abroad opportunity offered by the Division of Student Affairs.
The students worked in a small rural hill tribe village in the Pang Mapa district of Northern Thailand located four hours outside of Chiang Mai. To the backdrop of the beautiful jungles of Thailand, students were set on the ambitious task of constructing a four-walled kitchen and dining area for the village community. The project is now a new feature for the hill tribe people. It will be used for the entire village to cook and host meaningful events such as funerals and weddings.
Prior to their departure, the students organized a fundraiser to raise money to purchase the tools and construction materials for the project. They successfully raised $2,000 through donations, which was enough to fully cover the materials for building as well as future improvements.
Once the community project had been decided, the students worked on every detail alongside the local people from the planning to the construction. The students manually mixed cement. They moved hundreds of cinderblocks to the construction site. They filtered sand and nailed together latticework made of bamboo and laid and set the tile for the flooring.
″I have never expected life in Thailand to be so simple and relaxed; our trip to Thailand was the best 10 days of my life. I will never forget the people there, the group I went with, the adventure and the heavy labor that we did," said Mohammed Fahad Kamal, a Qatari business administration major at Carnegie Mellon Qatar. "Helping the community in Thailand was an extremely rewarding experience for me. If I were to pick a country rather than Qatar to live in, it would absolutely be Thailand.″
The students recall working against the clock as the team raced to get piles of sand and rock under shelter before the heavy rains came it. They formed an assembly line; pushing each other to move the materials as fast as possible.
On the final day, the women of the village displayed their gratitude to the team from Carnegie Mellon Qatar through traditional gestures of decorating the students with fragrant jasmine flower garland.
"We could tell how genuine and grateful they were to have had us there helping them build the community kitchen. I am never going to forget my experience in Thailand. This service trip was truly unforgettable," said Rifki Bahri, a business administration major at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.
Service Learning is an important component to the philosophy of Student Affairs as the University works to develop students who are engaged in and contribute back to their communities.
"Witnessing the impact of this experience on our students and the seeing the gratitude of the villagers was immensely gratifying for me" says Melissa Deschamps, Director of International Education, Carnegie Mellon Qatar. "Community service in an international setting allows students to not only help others, but it gives them the chance to experience a different culture and get a glimpse of how others live."
Donating money is a good way to help others, but giving of your self is even better. The learning that takes place when students roll up their sleeves and work alongside the local people they are helping is immeasurable. In just ten days you can see how providing these opportunities to students profoundly enriches their university experience and global perspective.
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ABOUT CARNEGIE MELLON
With more than a century of academic excellence and innovative research, Carnegie Mellon University is a global leader in education with real-world applications. Consistently top ranked, Carnegie Mellon offers a distinct mix of programs to over 10,000 students around the globe. Core values of innovation, creativity, problem solving and collaborative teamwork provide the foundation for everything we do.
At the invitation of Qatar Foundation, Carnegie Mellon joined Education City in 2004. Here, Qatar Foundation has created a world-class center for scholarship and research that is the ideal complement to Carnegie Mellon's tradition of innovation through collaboration. Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar offers its highly regarded undergraduate programs in business administration, computer science and information systems to students in Qatar and the Gulf Region.
