On my first day in Laos, I was mugged.  I had flown into Luang Prabang from Bangkok on Monday afternoon and was ready to get on the backpacker trail again, seeing Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. I was walking down a quiet street from my hostel, Spicy Lao, just before 10 p.m. with two other girls from the hostel. We were walking in the street because the sidewalk was pretty narrow and I was closest to the road. All of a sudden, I heard this motor bike zoom up beside me and my left...

We’d been planning this night for a month. The efforts of volunteers from Help Without Frontiers and Colabora Birmania all came down to one night at ExPPACT Bar. Saturday night was the Help for 42 fundraiser, our grand effort to raise money for the students from 42 kilometre school who were injured in the horrific bus crash on March 11, 2013.

In the weeks leading up to the event, I can safely say Flo, Julia and I visited almost every business in Mae Sot, collecting donatio...

Sadly, today was my last day volunteering with Help Without Frontiers in Mae Sot. One of the highlights of my time with the organization, which delivers education programs for Burmese migrant youth, has been working with the Rays of Youth team. It’s focused on offering skilled training to migrant teenagers from Burma who are in the stages of thinking of post secondary school and their future careers. My job was to help with journalism training and English teaching. About 2...

The first splash of water in the face was a shock. A bucket of ice cold water comes at me without warning, except for the excited screams of the kids yelling “farang” or foreigner, which is their signal to strike with extra gusto. By the end of the four day Songkran festival (or week-long by some calendars) the water assault feels about as natural as breathing. Because during the world’s biggest water festival, you can expect to get wet…and stay wet the entire time....

I woke up to the sounds of the refugee camp. Lying on a bamboo mat, with a mosquito net hanging from the bamboo beams of the thatched roof hut, I could hear men chopping wood, women scraping metal spatulas across iron woks where samosas and pakoras cooked in sizzling oil, children’s feet kicking up dust as they ran through the dirt lanes and dogs barking as they passed. Over it all, tinny music pumped out of a speaker from the monastery, in a harmony that made all the sound...