Sarah van Buren '13
Major/Minor: International and Global Studies and Biology major, Peace and Coexistence Studies and Women and Gender Studies minor
Year of Graduation: 2013
Hometown: Tokyo, Japan, but lived in eight countries including the United States
Previous Education: Hong Kong International School, Hong Kong and George Mason High School, Falls Church, VA
Clubs/Organizations: Students Crossing Boundaries, Community Advisor, Sorensen Fellow, Lerman-Neubauer Fellow
“I have three passports: Japan, America, and Diplomatic. And the passports are kind of a metaphor for me: every single place I go, every single person I meet, they put like a stamp on me, and it imprints and develops how I am. That’s how everybody is: the people you meet, the events that you encounter, the time that you spend in any place definitely influences you. Mine are just very obviously documented in my passports.”
Sarah Van Buren seems as comfortable traveling halfway around the world to live in a completely foreign country as sitting on a couch planning her next hall meeting. Her passions for women’s health and international and global studies combined this past summer in her Sorensen Fellowship at the Wildflower Home in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which provides safe shelter, health services, and education to mothers in crisis.
Most of the mothers at the home come from backgrounds of either the hill tribes or sex work. The primary hill tribes from which the women belong are Lahu, Hmong, and Akha, and due to the lack of rights of in Thailand many are not well educated and cannot get jobs. The high conservativeness of the hill tribes exacerbates the women’s situation, for if a girl gets pregnant for whatever reason – unprotected sex with her boyfriend, rape, or being pressured by her family to have sex with an important elder – she will be expelled from the tribe. In cases of sex workers, brothel owners find out the girls are pregnant, and because they are no longer of any use to them expel them, and they end up at places like the Wildflower Home. Most mothers were younger than 25 years of age, many in their early to mid-teens.
Sarah spent most of her time teaching the children: ages 2 through 15 were the same room since the lack of rights meant that hill tribe children do not have access to education. She taught them English, math, science, and art, as well as English to the mothers and working in the communal gardens.
She describes how the biggest culture shock was getting used to life on a farm, for the home focuses on being fairly self-sufficient by growing many of their own vegetables and raising some animals. Sarah relayed many stories of her adventures with animals in the area, particularly a cat named Agnes who set up residence in Sarah’s room, and the fact that, as she relayed proudly, “I ate a bug. I ate two bugs, a cockroach and a cricket. Nope [they weren’t cooked.] They were dead.” Although she was a fan of the cricket (except for its legs) she described the cockroach as more earthy, and not as good.
Wildlife adventures aside, she says that “one thing that I wasn’t expecting is that people assumed I was Thai, which was very weird. I was not expecting that, and when I say that to people here they are very skeptical, like ‘you wish’.” On the one hand she was extremely flattered, and thrilled to be getting the real Thai experience, but on the other hand she was unfortunately exposed to the other side of being a Thai woman. Although western men had implicitly indicated their interest in propositioning her occasionally throughout the summer, it was not until the last day that it was explicit.
As she was walking down the road in Chiang Mai, a man on a motorcycle stopped, “and he seemed very nervous, so I thought he needed to find the hospital or something. He asked me, ‘are you available?’ and I responded, ‘what?’, and he replied ‘can you come back to my hotel room with me?’ It took me a long time to piece all the things together, and he just got off his motorcycle and started to try to touch me. I remember this one moment when I said ‘no, I’m an American.’ And he just went ‘oh! You’re an American!’ and got on his motorcycle and sped away.”
It is a credit to the type of person Sarah is that she does not focus on the fact that this had to happen to her, as most would, but rather on her response and the notions of privilege and identity arising from it. She is frustrated that she only has “just to say I’m an American, and everything is resolved immediately, whereas I think back to some of the women at the Wildflower Home, and this is the instance where they got raped … This was the moment in their lives that defined them, whereas I could get out of it easily.”
Her reflexiveness, respect for others, and refusal to use her privilege to her own ends is reflected in her reaction to an American Hmong woman who visited the Wildflower Home. Because the woman spoke Hmong, she was in a better position to communicate with the women, and took the opportunity to ask them why they were at the home, which from the beginning volunteers were taught to not ask for reasons of privacy and healing.
From the beginning of her time at the Wildflower Home, in fact, it was clear that a great deal of sensitivity was necessary when approaching the topic, and knowing what not to say, “in an icebreaker situation [in the United States] you ask someone where they come from and where they grew up, but that’s definitely not something that’s okay to ask [here], because some of these women come from very difficult pasts and they’re here to rehabilitate from those pasts.” Sarah said that she could always get “little glimpses of where they were coming from,” but she “didn’t try to finagle a way to find out peoples’ stories,” again reflective of the respectful and caring person she is.
This difficulty approaching their pasts also affected her ability to research and create the type of sexual health education programs she hoped to start. Because of the nature of the women’s backgrounds involving either the sex trade or some sort of traumatic experience, she was unable to teach any classes about STDs or sexual health. She was able to teach a class on breast cancer awareness, and was particularly pleased to be the recipient of a Rapaporte grant to buy materials for the class, including a silicon breast modeling the different stages of breast cancer to help teach women how to do self exams. She describes the confusion of the women at the breast, culminating in them asking her “Whose breast is that? Is it yours?” but says that once the confusion cleared up all laughed about it, and that the class was overall a great success.
Coming back to Brandeis and reflecting on her experiences with the Sorensen class is different than most return trips, she says. She describes the experience as, overall, “very introspective on my self, my privilege, how I came to be. So that was definitely not something I was expecting.” All of her thoughts seem tinted with this introspection, even her short breaks from the home, when she was able to go to Chiang Mai on the weekends. She says these breaks were extremely helpful and necessary because “there were weeks that were just so trying, and I feel guilty saying it because I had the chance to escape. It was a day and a half, or a day, but I got a chance to escape, take a breather, and come back really refreshed, whereas the women who live there, that was their life.”
This introspection carries through to her thoughts about what many people asked her upon her return: was it life changing? Her response, quintessentially Sarah van Buren in realism and idealism: “everything I wanted to do with my life is still the same. Nothing has changed in terms of my goals, or who I am really, but it’s made me much more aware of how I impact my society rather than how my society impacts me.”
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