Room to Grow and Burma Border Projects have been collaborating on projects in Mae Sot for many years now. R2G is proud to support the work that BBP does building strong resilient children and communities. For the past month, we’ve hosted a wonderful intern from Canada, an undergraduate student from Simon Fraser University in Canada, and her job this summer is to play.

Play, you might think, is the total opposite of a job. Or you might be thinking that she is the luckiest woman on the planet, to spend her summer playing with children and to be getting credit for it.

If you’ve never seen Stuart Brown talk about play and polar bears, and you’ve never thought about play as just as essential to survival as food, you should watch this.

Playing with children, for our intern, isn’t just about having a good time. Its about facilitating activities that build creative and critical thinking, that foster positive self esteem and that build strong communication skills and good relationships. Its about building up children’s inner resources to help them handle the challenges of life on the border and live in a difficult world.

Over the next few months, the newest member of the R2G team will be doing a lot more than drawing pictures and singing songs. She’s also going to be helping improve peer mentoring programs, digging deeper into what children without parents really need to improve their lives today, and running around in the rain and the mud delivering underwear and other needed supplies. Perhaps, if she has time, she may even be convinced to write a few blogs and share with you what it’s like to be an intern in the strange and wonderful world of Mae Sot.