They have $6k usd to blow and they buy a bunch of supplies for kid villagers in a very inaccessible jungle region of Thailand (surrounded on 3 sides by Myanmar).
The kids all knew Michael and it was a community event.
They gave the vlogger a present. ‘especially coming from here, where all that matters is having a good heart.’
One of the daughters is studying, they report, to become a doctor, and would be the first person from the village to finish higher ed. What could be the good outcome from this, on a larger scale? I mean, we don't want everyone to just leave the villages and go to the cities, and we don't want even just the best people, the young, working age people, to leave and just send money back to the little kids and older people. Perhaps the best could be if people who move to the cities have ties to a village, patronize it, and return to it sometimes, so people are living in both spots? But it's hard to see how such commute doesn't lead to everyone just leaving it.
A rotary club there, German speaking, built a dormitory for the school, because the kids live too far to walk every day. People live in smaller collections of 3-6 houses in the mountains. If their child goes away to school to study, who would work the farm? Some of these foreigners pay them to offset these hardships, which I'm not sure what the effect of that would be. ‘The dorms are what makes it all work, because without the dorms the kids can’t come to study.' Then they go around door to door to try to get the families to send their kids to study.
All the way in there, there is a travelling band.
Asian countries should really have programs for visitors, to teach them something about local culture. Not only so foreigners don't ruin things, like they do in Japan and to a degree in Thailand, by their forceful ethnocentrism, but also there's just so much Westerners can learn from Asian cultures and societies.