Sunday - Camillian Social Centre,

Fr Peter Pakhavi 

Another tradition is for our small party to visit the Camillian Social Centre in Rayong on the Sunday of our visit, to attend Mass with the children and usually to go on to the Garden of Eden project in the afternoon.  Mass at the Camillian Social Centre is always a memorable experience.  The children are fully involved with the service as altar boys, readers, and most importantly as the choir.  The singing is always deeply moving, filled with joy, hope and purpose, like the Centre itself.  Of course there are questions asked about bringing these children up as Catholics.  I am not a Catholic, nor am I any sort of evangelical, but I understand why the children share the faith.  When Fr Giovanni started his work, the children came with HIV infected parents.  Invariably the parents died, and Fr Giovanni was left with sole responsibility for the child.  Inevitably the child would also die, and Fr Giovanni would be beside them in their last moments.  He shared his faith with his children because it would bring them - and him - comfort in their last moments.

Now there is the miracle of affordable anti-retroviral drugs, so death is no longer inevitable.  But the ethos of the Centre had been established and continues, it is one huge Catholic family.  Whilst death may not be inevitable, it is by no means unknown.  Three days before our visit, New 2 let slip her frail grip on life aged just 11.  'It often happens', said Paul Baird, a volunteer from Manchester who has worked with the Centre for several years.  'The children sometimes arrive too late.  They seem to get better when they get treatment, but then suddenly the virus fights back, and they have no strength to beat it.  They need to be here two years before we know they are safe.'  New 2 had been at the Centre just a year.

So the Mass and the children's upbeat singing had a special poignancy for them this Sunday.  There cannot have  been any one of them who had not thought 'that could so easily have been me'.  But this close family has born the loss of New 2 with great fortitude thanks to its shared faith and the confidence and strength which flow from Fr Peter and Fr Pridha, the two priests who now lead the Camillian Centre.

I was pulled to the front by Fr Peter, the priest who now heads the medical and social care projects, who explained that the children wanted to give me a present.  They sang me a song.  What better present could there be in this place where music is so important.  I was very touched, and very grateful.  This was a special Sunday which I will remember for many years.  Although the children were bright and cheerful, I think all our party were prick-eyed at points.

The Mass is followed by a chance to meet old friends like Khun Jintana (who I now discover is known to her friends as Khun Coy) who works so hard on sponsorship matters.  Then lunch, with Fr Peter and Fr Pridha, the new Superior, and all the children from the Centre and from Independent Living.  A chance to meet old friends and make some new.  Then off to the Garden of Eden to revisit the house which we saw opened just one year ago.

This was a great moment.  The house is now home to 11 orphans, children whose lives have been massively changed by HIV although they are not themselves HIV+.  A happy group, in the care of Miss Phongphan Phayupa, a dynamo lady who is always busy.  Those people who kindly made donations for this house can be proud of how their money has been used.  The house is sparkling clean, tidy, well organised.  The children have a full rota of duties and homework from waking at 6 a.m. to bed again at 8 p.m..  They have their own kitchen garden, and help with the cleaning, washing, feeding the fish and feeding the frogs.  It is a busy life.  They attend a local school, and the small group take care of each other.  The newest recruit, a young man of about ten, was asked whether he was happy in his new home. 'Yes', he replied.  'What do you like best about it?'  'My friends.' he said.  'Who are your friends'.  Without a pause he started reeling off names, and then stopped dead and looked straight at us. 'All of them', he said.

Saturday: Redemptorist Foundation for People with Disabilities, Children's Village, Children's Home, Chinese Acrobats at the Orphanage

First meeting with the day with old friend Suporntum Mongkolsawadee, one of the most impressive - maybe the most impressive - players in the world of disabled education, employment and rights in Thailand today.  Once a pupil at the Redemptorist Vocational School for the Disabled (known here as 'Mahathai'), Suporntum's ability was recognised and he swiftly became a teacher, then Head Teacher.  He used that position with great skill to build the reputation and capacity of the school and to help advance the rights of people with disabilities throughout Thailand to access education and employment on equal terms.  Some time ago Suporntum moved across to the head the Redemptorist Foundation, whose services to disabled people include the job placement agency, including a 'job club', small enterprise development, handicraft training and sales, the provision of services to disabled people locally through the Chonburi Association of People with Disabilities and a tiny school offering specialist services to children with special needs ranging from physical handicaps to autism.  It is a daunting range of problems, but one of Suporntum's great strengths has been his ability to choose and promote people of real ability to work alongside him.

One of these is Eknarin Swatwaengkuang, Chief Job Placement Officer.  His group acts as a specialist dating agency, painstakingly matching  potential employees to potential employers in terms of ability, experience, interests - and investigates whether the individual's particular disability permits them to function successfully in the employers unadapted premises, since there is no legal obligation here for employers to make changes to accommodate disabled employees.  It is not an easy job, and many potential placements fall at that last fence because the disabled candidate cannot use the employer's premises and the employer cannot, or will not, pay to make changes.  But the JPA has built up a list of employers who have successfully recruited people with disabilities as employees, and who have come back for more.  The target of 250 people to be placed in work in 2011 is not high, but it is realistic.  In 2010, 160 such placements were made, each one a triumph for common sense.

There will be more about the work of the Foundation later in the week.

A housemother and her children at the Fr Ray Children's Village.

Our next port of call was the Fr Ray Children's Village, a project started a couple of years ago which gives some children the opportunity to live in a stable quasi-family environment.  Each house has a 'house mother' who sleeps in the house with the children and is a full-time carer.  But unlike real mums, they can call on the services of an 'Auntie' to give them time for the occasional day off.  There can be no doubting that this is a heaven for children who have come from tough and sometimes abusive backgrounds.  They live in a 'street' - actually a private cul-de-sac - in their own family home.  But all the neighbours are similarly homes to families with young children, so there are loads of friends to play with.  And play they do, happily and safely all around the site.  The smiles on the faces of the Mums and the children really say all that needs to be said about the success of this project.

Children's Home residents, staff and visitors.

Next visit was to the Children's Home.  There was a time a few years ago when I was ashamed for visitors to see this project, it was failing badly.  Then along came Khun Daeng, who turned out to be a miracle-worker.  

Khun Daeng has lots of experience in running children's homes, and applies a simple philosophy that a busy child is a happy child, and therefore a child who is unlikely to get into trouble.  The children have a huge choice of activities. 

During our short visit we saw girls picking and weighing mushrooms. boys doing their washing, the football team return from a match (they lost, don't even ask!) lots of children in the library watching a dvd on a huge television (it was Saturday!) and no doubt others were following different pastimes in parts of the site which we didn't manage to visit. The Home has two mushroom sheds, and sells half its production.  It breeds chickens, grows vegetables, has dogfish tanks and pigs.  Children can learn Thai boxing or Tae Kwando.  There are computers, books, TVs, football pitches.  And all are in regular use. 

Well done, Khun Daeng, a great achievement - a happy, busy home for happy, busy children who have fulfilled, purposeful lives.

Finally to the Guanxi Acrobat Dance Show at the Pattaya Orphanage - sorry no photos of this one.  An amazing show - the acrobats were astonishing.   But to Fr Michael Weera, Khun Toy and their team, warmest congratualtions.  The organisation was perfect, everything went entirely smoothly, and they hit their target of 4000 people (it looked more from the stage) being drawn into the Pattaya Orphanage to make friends.  Thanks for the invitations, it was a storming success all round.

Friday 28 - Pattaya Orphanage, the Deaf School and the School for Blind Children

It is quite something to be Father to more than 180 children at the age of seventy, but this man, Fr Michael Weera, is happy in that job.  He is the Director of the Pattaya Orphanage, and he is having a ball!  Like Fr Ray, he loves the children;  he cares about their successes and their failures.  Like Fr Ray, he is enormously proud of the the group which has made it to university.  He has done deals with local private Catholic schools to admit children from the Orphanage at reduced or no cost so that as many as possible get the best possible start in life.  The children know that he is there for them, whatever they need, whenever they need it.

To pay school fees, the Orphanage has run a terrifically successful fundraising campaign locally.  One event produced a massive 1.6 million baht surplus for the fund.  The following day a child fell badly from a see-saw and had to be rushed to the Bangkok Pattaya Hospital.  'There was no time to take him to a public hospital', said Fr Michael 'he would certainly have died.'  The boy went to private hospital.  He had brain surgery and massses of stitches.  Today he is fine.  A lot of the 1.6 million had gone, so the Orphanage went out and raised some more.  Children's needs come first, which is right, but this gentle man is clearly quietly determined.  The children could not have a better champion.

This is the amazing therapeutic play area which has opened since our last visit.  The facility is shared between the Orphanage and the School for the Deaf.

This was a great morning, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.  Thank you, Fr Mike, thank you Pattaya Orphanage.  

The indomitable Ajarn Aurora, founder and still Head of the Pattaya School for the Blind kindly gave us two hours of her time in the afternoon.  We had a long and interesting discussion about the stunning new building she has constructed across the road from the School.  The building - the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn building - will be a Vocational Training Centre  when it is finally completed later this year.

It is difficult to estimate what this tiny lady has achieved during her busy life of service to others, or what her work has meant to generations of visually impaired children who have passed through the school she founded.  What we do know,for absolute certain, is that she needs our help to fund the salaries of properly trained and qualified teachers of vocational skills like Thai Classical music and handicrafts so that her children can access better jobs more easily.  You may hear more about this later in the year, who knows?

The day ended with a jolly and rather large dinner party during which I had the privilege of meeting Fr Cotan, legendary among Thai Redemptorists since he was on the second group of US Redemptorists to arrive in Thailand.  He has been in Thailand since 1949, and is now a sprightly 95.  But maybe as unforgettable was the picture of the current Vice-Provincial of the Redemptorists in Thailand making cat noises to a toddler at the next table.  They were both having fun.

Back to Pattaya

Since 2004, every visit to Pattaya has started the same way.  In a quiet, leafy graveyard at the back of St Niklaus Church is the grave of Fr Ray Brennan, who lies in the Redemptorist plot beside his friend, colleague and brother Redemptorist Fr Patrick Morrissey.  Each year we spend a moment there, place flowers for each, and try to remember amidst the pleasure of meeting all our old friends, that our visit is work and has a serious purpose.  On this, our eighth visit, we were accompanied as always by Fr Ray's devoted friend and PA, Khun Toy who has always generously found the time to join us for this visit.

But as Fr Ray was fond of saying 'choose a job you love and you will never do a day's work in your life'.  For me, it is the people.  If you work with people you like and respect, then work becomes a joy.  And coming back to Pattaya is always a joy.  An hour or two with Khun Toy catching up on news of old friends.  We will visit the Pattaya Orphanage tomorrow, and again on Saturday, if possible.  After we left Khun Toy, we found Audrey Williams sorting donated clothes outside CP, Luke with literally tonnes of donated rice inside.  Moments later, Khun Somnuk, Khun Jai, Khun Boonthawee.  Three wonderful women, devoted to the Fr Ray Foundation.  Minutes later, Fr Peter Pattarapong stopped his car to get out and say hello! although he was on his way to the keenly fought basketball final at the national disabled games.  Chonburi lost narrowly, but the Vocational School had graduates in the winning team, and in the teams which came second and third.

There are so many friends I cannot name them all.  We know more people here than we know in our home village.  In fairness, the Fr Ray Foundation Family is about ten times the size of our village, which has but 140 people, or so.  After a very interesting meeting with Fr Peter and Bro Denis, and another meeting to discuss film, especially a film about and of Fr Larry Patin, we retired to our room with faces aching happily with constant smiling.

Oxbow Lakes

We flew into beloved Thailand today, in my case for the fifteenth time.  I say 'beloved'advisedly: if we didn't like it a lot, and have a lot of friends here, we really wouldn't keep coming back.  And here we are.

But the thought for today was sparked by an amazing view of Burma from the aircraft (thank you EVA, brilliant as always) which flew for an hour down the Andaman Sea coast, sometimes on the coast, sometimes just a bit inland.  The landscape here, as in Thailand, is formed by limestone hills with wide areas of plain formed by the deposit of silt from mountains hundreds of miles away in the Himalayas and in China.  The plains are dotted with Oxbow lakes, lakes formed by a meandering river eventually eroding its banks so that the looping meander is cut off as the river cuts a more direct course.  I 'did' these in Geography fifty years ago, but I have never before seen such classic examples as today.  They don't happen in the UK, where our comparatively short rivers tumble swiftly off the hills and batter their short path directly to the sea.

And the landscape of Burma is very natural.  Little by way of roads, towns, industrial developments. From the air, it is apparently virgin jungle with little human impact.

As you do when tired and a bit dehydrated, I let my mind wonder.  I thought back to 'Pop Weg', Mr Victor Steggal to give him his proper name, our Geography teacher at Ashville College in the 1960s.  It was he who first introduced me to Oxbow Lakes.  He also introduced us all to Yerba Mate (we were studying South America for O-level) a truly unpleasant, but very memorable experience.  He was that rare and wonderful thing, a born teacher.  He had the distinction of having been born at one minute past midnight on the 1st January 1900, so aged exactly with the century, until he dropped out in the eighties, and the century carried on.  His white moustache was neatly trisected by two deep amber lines, which spoke volumes about numerous cigarettes consumed, although never in sight of his pupils.  He was the only Master remaining at Ashville who had been evacuated with the school to the Lake District during the war.  He was a bachelor, a Cambridge graduate, when I knew him quite ancient, and astonishingly capable of communicating his interest in and enthusiasm for countries beyond the narrow compass of Yorkshire.

He was 48 when Burma achieved independence from the British Empire.  In our - somewhat precipitate - departure we left a few apparently minor issues incompletely resolved.  I wonder how 'Pop Weg' would feel if he knew that more than sixty years later, and probably thirty years after his death, those unresolved issues are still costing lives.  Burma as a country is no better off - arguably worse - than she was in 1948.  The view from the air says, by contrast, Thailand has done well.  Her countryside has roads, trading estates, new towns, visible evidence of investment and economic growth.  Her people are increasingly prosperous and, although that prosperity is by no means evenly shared, there are today very many Thai people who have the benefit of secure and well-paid employment, a good education, proper healthcare and the freedom to engage in politics.  That last comment will cause some squeals, even from my friends, but please!  Compared with Burma?  Compared with Burma Thailand has moved forward at lightspeed , her people have every right and reason to hope - and a real expectation - that this vital and confident country will find its way to some sort of generally acceptable constitutional settlement.  That may not be close, it may be hard to achieve, but it is certainly achievable.  Our prayer must be that it can be achieved peacefully.  Burma, by contrast again, has gone backwards since 1948.  Her people have every reason to be jealous of the Thai, but they probably don't have the time.

As a Brit, although maybe more as a historian than a geographer, I have to face this question - did we let Burma down?  I am very afraid that we did just that.  I think Mr Steggal might agree. This is not what anyone expected in 1948.