I remember the moment that first set me on the path to coming to Ranong. I had just finished my third year of university- this being Scotland, undergraduate courses last four years- and had returned home for the summer. I was sitting in my room, watching one of my favourite Catholic YouTubers, when he suddenly asked a question that pierced through my comfortable complacency and struck me right at the heart: what are you doing for God in your life?
On a whim, I put down the computer and began to pray. And almost immediately, the answer came. It came in the form of a question, a question that suddenly took up the whole of my attention and seemed as clear as if someone had just spoken to me: have you considered the missions?
That was the start of a long journey that ended up taking another two years, two years that were filled with emails, studying, planning and sudden unexpected personal tragedy, but on 9th April 2025, twenty-three months after the thought had first occurred to me, I arrived in Ranong to begin helping to teach English as a foreign language to the students at the Marist Asia Foundation. I was scared, alone in a foreign country for the first time in my life, and a long way from home. Somehow I was going to have to help 70 Burmese refugee children, whose educational background would be patchy at best and who were all dealing with their own personal tragedies away from their own home country, learn how to speak English, and I was going to have to do it through a language barrier. To say that I was beginning to wonder what I had got myself into would have been an understatement.
Thankfully, I need not have worried. To begin with, the community here was fantastic. Both the Marist Fathers and the RNDM Sisters were a wonderful help, always ready to help me with any difficulties I faced and to make me feel at home. The Marists worked really hard to make me feel part of their community, inviting me to join them for Mass every Wednesday and regularly having me over for meals. They also paid to enrol me in an online training course, to give me some of the skills I would need to do my job. The staff of the school were similarly helpful: I remember my first day at work, when I walked into the staff room to find a welcome card sitting on my desk. I remember thinking at that moment that maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad.
The kids were easily the greatest joy of the job. Listening to their English audibly improve over the course of year was a reward in and of itself, and I quickly became quite attached to them. They could drive me crazy sometimes with their misbehaviour, or when they struggled to grasp what I thought was a simple concept that I kept trying to explain to them, but it was a rare day that I did not leave work without feeling some sense of satisfaction, and I remember the pride I felt after I saw their final exams and realised that the vast majority of them had passed. Their obvious affection for me was equally touching, and the two occasions when they presented me with a bag of treats they had bought themselves helped reassure me that I must have been doing something right.
That’s not to say there weren’t any difficulties. I adapted to the tropical climate quicker than I thought I would, but the culture clash still took some getting used to and I never really got over the language barrier. Sometimes I would struggle with loneliness, and it took being overrun by ants to teach me never to leave food exposed in the house overnight. All these problems, however, I was able to get around, through a mix of my own resourcefulness and the never-failing help of the community, and I made it to the end of the year having not only survived, but thrived as well.
Looking back now as I prepare to return home, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that my time in Ranong has greatly shaped me as a person, and will continue to play an important role in my life moving forward. The things I have seen and the people I have met will all keep making an impact on me in the years to come. I have also grown spiritually during this time, and I leave Thailand feeling closer to God than I did when I first arrived. I think more Christians could benefit from leaving the comforts of their home for a while to follow God into the unknown, to see where they will end up. I do not know if I will ever return to Ranong, but even if I do not I will carry the lessons I have learned here for the rest of my life.
