By Michaela Hermanova and Veronika Vanisova, Charles University, Prague

It has been just a year since we first heard about the work of BABSEACLE. We belong to a group of students at our law school who want to pursue the law in practice, rather than only study law in books. We have a street law project, in which we learn CLE methods and then teach legal rights at Czech high schools. Our teacher told us about the BABSEACLE Legal Studies Externship Clinic and highly recommended the program’s leaders.

Although we did not really know what kind of activities were waiting for us, we decided to apply.  We hoped to learn more about street law, and also “legal soft-skills“ which are not part of our university curriculum and therefore difficult to adopt.

Thanks to the generous support of Prague Law School, we were able to leave at the beginning of August to the most distant destination we had ever been.

One of the major benefits of our journey became evident as soon as we arrived in Chiang Mai. We had to adapt to a completely different environment, in terms of weather, but especially in terms of cultural habits and traditions — to a different mentality, really. This was a fundamental change, because we rarely meet people from different cultures in Czech Republic.

We were excited by this challenge, because we believe today´s lawyers must be able to orient themselves to a multicultural environment. We want to work with multinational companies and organizations. So, from the moment we arrived in Thailand, we started to pursue experiences for our future professional lives. Here are some of our activities:

Mediation Workshop

One of the first things we worked on was a workshop on mediation with Prof. Melinda Edwards, an Australian specialist on alternative dispute resolution (ADR). We helped her prepare the workshop for two local universities using the CLE techniques (that’s our team in the photo above).

Teaching at Wildflower

Wildflower Home serves young mothers (or mothers to be) in desperate situations. They provide shelter, health services and also education to young women who have had to leave their home villages. (Some are sent away, some are victims of rape or incest.) BABSEACLE runs a weekly class to teach the women basic legal rights. The first week of our stay we only observed, and the next week we taught. It was rather difficult, because we needed interpreters, but it felt great to participate in the work that Wildflower is doing.