Our Story.

I was walking down the streets of Fang, Thailand, orange robes draped around me, my head shaved, feeling the warm asphalt underneath my bare feet. As the motorbikes raced past me, I held on tightly to my empty bowl, trying to move my attention away from how hungry I was. 

How humbling it was to be entirely dependent on someone else for food and sustenance. How wild and foreign the thought to be at the mercy of someone else’s goodwill.

I thought about the kids I had met the day before, studying in an abandoned farmhouse, in a country they didn’t know. Chased our of their homes in Myanmar and forced to flee across the border, they too were at the mercy of others. Yet the difference was: while I had - at least for a while - chosen the life of a Buddhist monk, they had not chosen their fate.

My emotions grew larger when I noticed that through it all, these kids still had all this life in them, all this joy.  After countless doors were shut on them, they had found one that remained open: the door to the farmhouse; the glimpse of an education; the dream of a future.

For long I had taken that door for granted. 

But months later, when I learned that the farmhouse was closing, I understood how uncertain and unreliable that door was for so many others, how easily it could be shut. I knew then and there that what I wanted to do was to open that door again. And many more after that one. Heck, what I wanted to do was to turn walls into doors. And luckily, I wasn’t the only one with that dream.

Less than a year later, the doors of the old farmhouse re-opened a school called “Somwang”, the Thai word for fulfilling dreams.

Quite some time has passed since those early days, but our hearts are as full as ever. Our team has gained in experience and our reach has grown significantly, allowing us to open new doors in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

But we still feel like we are just getting started: every time we open a new door, it still feels like the very first one.