So Many Stories, So Little Time

Moving in with a new family and starting a new job anywhere can give you lots of things to share, but especially in a place where the story is so unfamiliar to the western world. To be honest, I had not heard much about Laos before I came and I still have a lot to learn.
I'll tell you about the school where I'm at. It is a private school, so the families pay a small fee to go there. There are about 600 students there from kindergarten to middle school, all of whom are entertained by having a foreign teacher at the school. I'll be teaching to just about all the classes (all except kindergarten), which is what the other english teachers have been doing so far. They actually did not study to be teachers, like me, so they are a bit over their heads. So are the kids, apparently. We had end-of-the-month exams last week which I helped to oversee (gave up trying to prevent communal exam taking as that was frustrating and not how I wanted my first interaction with the kids to be). I did not see the scores for other subjects but there is a bit of work to be done in English. That's why I'm here, though, right?
That's the visa-earning reason and I'll try to do my part. But another important reason is to hear stories like Dtoi's. He is teaching english, just his second year out of college. He earns $50 a month doing so, but $45 of that goes to rent and another $45 a month for food, I understood. He does some more teaching on the side, but I'm not sure how he makes ends meet. And I'm not sure what to think of the fact that that is more than government workers make here ($30) and less than I am making as a volunteer ($66 a month for personal use). Why is some of the world so materially rich and why am I blessed enough to be part of that rich world?