Monday 18 February

The children in Sarnelli are in school, of course, so our day was spent visiting the Good Shepherd Sisters in Nongkhai. The doyenne of the community is Sister Mary, above, a doughty 89 years old and many many miles from her native Ireland which she left in 1939.

The work of the Good Shephers here parallels the work in Pattaya, empowering women through work. They provide workshops enabling disadvantaged women to earn a living sewing, weaving, and engaged in other handicrafts. Some of these ladies might be forced into moving south and taking undesirable work in the bars if there was no work for them in their native north east. Others have already taken the road south and returned.

There will be opportunities to purchase their work - t-shirts, purses and bags in striking designs - from our website later in the year. Sign up for the enews to be kept informed of when these products will be available.

Back to Sarnelli

Sunday.  Another airport, a new destination.  We take off from Dom Munang, the old International airport for Bangkok.  Now its domestic flights only.  The huge international terminal is deserted.  It is eerie.

 

Sarnelli House and its associated houses at Vienkhuk and St Patricks are home to more than 120 children. Almost all are orphaned by AIDS.  About half were born HIV+.  A devoted team cares for them under the benign authority of Fr Mike Shea who has been in north east Thailand for more than 40 years. 

 

Since I was last here the place has been transformed by an invasion of bulders and BUPA.  The bulders have constructed a new hgouse for teenage girls at Sarnelli - the site where all the children with HIV are housed. They are half way through building a new 'House of Hope', a special home for babies and toddlers.  The old one was falling apart, and anyway it was too small.  Now a new building for teenage boys is needed.  Hint.

 

BUPA were here for 6 weeks to celebrate their 60th anniversary.  60 volunteers came to work, and had worked before they arrived to raise 60,000 uk.  The result is basketball courts, extensive repainting, new bathrooms, new kitchens, and hot water and other amenities of modern life.  A transformation. 

 

More tomorrow.  Slight technical challenges today.  May have found out how to do photos for tomorrow, watch this space.

Back to the Camillian Centre

Back to the Camillian Centre for a shorter visit. Fr Giovanni has organised a little show for us - there are half a dozen UK visitors. First six of the young people from Independent Living, five girls and a boy, dancing and miming to pop music. They are very good. The girls are neat and precise in their movements. The lone boy, far from being bashful or coy, is relaxed, cool and clearly having fun. The other children clap and cheer noisily. Then thirty younger children sing three merry songs.

Then the surprise of the afternoon. A group of six Japanese nurses in bright silk jackets dance to a song about a fisherman. They are simply amazingly good; snap to time, fast, energetic, graceful. We know how hard they work and wonder where they find the energy to perform to this standard, much less the time for essential rehearsal. Then the older ones again with a song based extraordinarily on the Marche Turque. But again they are brilliant.

Fr Giovanni explains that the Centre regularly welcomes Japanese nurses as volunteers, they come for experience. He values the Japanese contribution especially because these young people bring more to nursing than just technical skill. They bring life and vitality, and give freely of their own high spirits.

What a memorable afternoon this turned out to be. From the youngest to the oldest we were caught up in the infectious enjoyment of life shared by the carers and by the wonderful young people who are Fr Giovanni's numerous but close family. It was a privilege to be there and share their celebration of life. Thank you all.

PS travelling north to Nongkhai on Sunday, maybe no posting. Apologies. But there will then be 2 days of news from Sarnelli etc before closedown and return to UK.

Back to the school for the blind

Today was Sports Day at the School for Blind Children. This is an occasion we try not to miss. It is raucous, colourful and lots of fun. The children run, skip, swim, play goal-ball and other team sports with balls with internal bells. It is an eye-opening display of the abilities of the blind and partially sighted. The school's band plays with enthusiasm and, this year at least, tunefully. The whole school sings at the close, a Thai version of 'Auld Lang Syne' which is haunting; familiar but exotic.

Good news about little Baytoy of whom we wrote on Tuesday. Mr Kirk Horton, of the US Hilton/Perkins programme, tells me that there is a teacher in Thailand who can help. Actually there may be as many as three. He will make arrangements.. Thank you, Mr Horton, you are a real friend to this little girl.

The Fountain of Life

Hidden away in a small sidestreet in Pattaya is a project which is different from any other supported by Pattaya Orphanage Trust, but one which is innovative and truly inspirational.

The Good Shepherd Sisters mission is to women and children who are marginalised, opressed and disempowered. There are few women more opressed and marginalised than those who work in the hotels and bars of Pattaya. Their world embraces - if that is the word - work and relationships which are so poorly paid that they verge on slavery. Either can involve prostitution. There are real personal risks in terms of violence and disease.

The work of the Good Shepherd Sisters is to put such women back in charge of their lives. No judgements are made. The ladies are given respect and thus encouraged to respect themselves. There is a wide range of educational opportunity - languages, computing, dressmaking, hairdressing. The Fountain of Life building is modern, clean and buzzing with activity. Three hundred women attend classes every day.

Why is the Trust interested? Our mission after all is to children, so why concern ourselves with prostitutes and cooks? These ladies are mothers. Their children can, if left untended, run off to become street kids, get into crime, or be victims of violence or worse from unsuitable boyfriends. Empowering the women is protecting the children.

Sisters Joan and Supaporn above are among the Sisters responsible for the Fountain of Life. Theirs is a very rare vocation, and the lives of many women and children in Pattaya would be poorer by far without their extraordinary work.

Pattaya School for the Blind

Yesterday I met a young woman who is serving a life sentence in prison. What makes her case particularly poignant is that her prison is her own body. Baytoy (the spelling may be wrong) is deaf and blind, and so far as her school has been able to establish there are no teachers of the deaf-blind yet in Thailand.

The staff and the wonderful Ajarn (teacher) Aurora communicate with her via lots of hugs and touching, but if she is ever going to lreach her potential - and Baytoy is an intelligent girl - she must have specialist teachers. That may mean going to live abroad.

It is awful to think that this defenceless and vulnerable child may have to be uprooted from home, family and her own culture. The move can never be properly explained to her, and she will be bewildered. I wondered if it was the right thing, and doubted.

But the alternative is the life sentence; an intelligent girl trapped incommunicado for ever, in a state of constant frustration. How dreadful that would be.

This child needs help.

Vocational Training

How many schools for people with disabilities actually have their own radio station? Not too many, I guess, but the Vocational Training School in Pattaya has just that, see photo, broadcasting over an area 5 km radius around the school.

The station is one of the activities happening in the Wattanathon Building, to whose construction Pattaya Orphanage Trust made a substantial contribution. This was my first chance to see the building operating fully: last time I was here was for the opening by HRH Princess Maha Chakrabati Sirindhorn. The Princess gave the name 'Wattanathon' meaning 'progress with compassion' - a very charming and appropriate description not only of the building but of the school.

I think our supporters would be very happy with the results of their generosity. The building houses an excellent language lab which is in constant use. The additional classroom space has enabled two new courses to start. One is 'mold and die' a computer-assisted design course, and a basic education course for people whose disability prevented their ever attending school.

Plans for next year include satellite courses in different parts of Thailand - challenging, but well within the capacity of the energetic and capable team who make this fabulous project hum with purpose.

Street Kids

Today was one of the most important visits of this trip, to the Street Kids project to meet the new Director Khun Supachai, known to all a Paw Aw Daeng. He is a professional childcare specialist, and one of Thailand 's top experts on Child Protection.

It is impossible not to like Daeng on sight. He has a wide smile, great warmth and unlimited enthusiasm for his work and for the children in his care. The site is filled with new activities - the children are growing vegetables, there's a plant nursery growing orchids,and there are chickens. There are two new computer training rooms, each with more than 20 computers. I was impressed to see all the computers in the boys' section in use under the guidance of an expert teacher.

There are outside activities too. The children have been divided into groups of about 20, each group in the care of a couple of adult leaders. These groups, always with the same leaders, go out on activities regularly , one of the objectives being to strengthen the links between the children and between the children and the leaders. To adapt the old adage,'the family that plays together stays together.'

There will be a full write up on this in the Newsletter shortly. For now one comment will suffice, from Mr Tom Vincent, an old friend of Fr Ray Brennan, who has been consistently among the most generous of supporters. He has known the Street Kids project for as long as it has been running. Today, he says simply, it is 'best ever.'

Camillian Centre, Rayong

Thom and Mon story is typical of children in the care of Fr Giovanni and his extraordinary team. They are brothers, age 5 & 6. Their father died recently - he had AIDS. Their mother, who is HIV+, distraught at the loss of her husband was involved in an accident in which she was injured and Thom and Mon's baby sister was killed. The two boys are themselves HIV+.

If this sounds gloomy - and you may be forgiven for thinking it is not the most cheerful of introductions - be prepared for a shock. This is the Camillian Centre where all things probable and improbable are possible. Not least happy, healthy children enjoying a supportive and loving home and all that brings in terms of a healthy diet (Fr Giovanni is Italian, obviously); the effortless support of his boundless faith; and their new, large but caring family.

It was an extra pleasure for us to see our special child here, Oon; not so much a child now as a delightful young woman, who is healthy, happy and successful in her education. I noticed for the first time how she is functional 'big sister' to her many brothers and sisters, remembering how each of them looked when they arrived in the family.

It was an unexpected joy to see Georgina and Paddy Phelan, so much a part of the Centre for so long and happily visiting - dare we tell the truth and say escaping the Canadian winter!

Back to Pattaya

Apologies for the recent silence. We spent two days in meetings and travelling back to Pattaya, and most of today catching up on overdue correspondence.

With a fair wind and a following tide the next three days should be better, since we visit Fr Giovanni and the Camillian Social Centre tomorrow, Street Kids on Sunday and the formidable combination of the VT School for the Disabled and the School for the Blind on Monday. There will be news and photographs.

Pattaya is always a pleasure, the gardens at the Redemptorist Centre are always tranquil, beautiful, restful. They were close to Fr Ray's heart, and it is impossible to walk through them without remembering him. They are lined by buildings he erected. I joked with him that he should appropriate Vanbrugh's epitaph - 'lie heavy on him, earth, for he laid many heavy weights on thee'.

But instead he rests under a simple, uniform stone with his fellow Redemptorists in another beautiful garden half a mile away.

More about Lunch Farms

This has been another hot and busy day. We visited four farms today at Ban Rapoo, Ban Rarmard, Pak Klong and Natong Klang. All of these schools are doing well. Two of them, I have to admit, would probably be doing fine without us.

Rarmard school has its own Palm Oil plantation which is very profitable. The profits are spent on school lunches. Children pay 100 Thai baht each month - about 1.50 uk - and can eat as much as they want every day. The food is really appetising and good, we would have joined in cheerfully. Pak Klong school has very poor land, so the head teacher has invested in cattle. He has 62 children and 90 cows. We were not quick-witted enough to ask whether this is a school with a farm or a farm with a school. Either way, the children benefit with plates piled with rice, fish and fresh vegetables.

Usually our work is long term so by the time we reach a conclusion the beginning is out of sight; this time the results have been achieved very promptly, on time and on budget. It has been really satisfying to see this project bring such very obvious results so quickly. I hope that some of the donors who have supported the lunch farm scheme so generously will read this and share that satisfaction.

Sunday

Another travelling day, meetings this morning, more this evening, but nothing new until tomorrow. Tomorrow is to visit one of my favourite places, the lovely island of Koh Lanta, always a treat, and our first three lunch farms. If the internet is working - there is a lot of rain - you can read about Koh Lanta tomorrow evening.

If its Monday, it must be...

Ko Lanta. Heaven is an island. Or was. the men with concrete and hotel signs are doing their best to deface it, and they have made huge strides in the past couple of years. In a few years more, Ko Lanta as it is today will have disappeared. But you don't want to hear about that.

Koh Lanta for us is Lunch Farms, two to be exact, at Ban Jae Lea and at Wat Ko Lanta. We visited a third on the mainland at Ban Klongyanud. Each of these schools is special to us because we saw them first when the tsunami was a very recent memory, when jobs were scarce and children were thin and haunted. The change that two years has made is quite extraordinary. the children are fit, healthy, happy. Their teachers tell us that school attendance is up, the standard of work is improved and grades are begining to show the improvement.

It would not be realistic to put all of this down to the lunch farms. Resources have been poured into this area by the Thai government and by a battery of NGOs. But we like to think we have made our contribution in a very direct way,by putting food in the children's tummies, enabling them to work harder and concentrate better.

All three lunch farms are making a material contribution to their schools between 25 to 35 percent of the total cost of lunches. Because this has been a learning experience for all of us, the farm have not performed perfectly, but they improve steadily, and the farm at Klongyanud in particular is a model of sustainability and community involvement. A truly successful project in these schools, we visit four more tomorrow, and I will report on those in due course.

Apologies for the lack of photographs, there are one or two minor technical challenges here. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, at least as far as illustrations are concerned. Apologies also for the lack of a post yesterday, same technical challenges apply.

BanTharn Namchai

When you enter a happy home, you know it straight away, and so it has always been when we visit this family in Khao Lak. It is a family whose members have all suffered dreadfully in recent years. These beachfront villages bore the brunt of the Tsunami, which swept across them and travelled far inland.

Some of the children in Ban Tharn Namchai lost family in the Tsunami, others are there because their parents have died, or are in hospital or even in prison. The tales of the individuals are full of heartbreak. But together they are strong, cheerful, happy, a normal family with their wonderful Mum Khun Rotjana at their head.

Our welcome was typically warm, typically Thai. The girls gave us three dances - dances which must have taken hours of patient work to perfect. They smiled throughout, giving generously of their free time.

They don't have too much free time because, as the timetable shows, their weekday starts at 05:30. They are up early to start school at 07:15! They are, we told them, a credit to their Mum, who looked on with pride very well justified.

This family is, admittedly, a little larger than most. The kids bring their friends around, and just like the Irish there is always room for one more... So 56 children sat down for lunch today.

But Khun Rotjana has a problem. People were very generous after the Tsunami, but interest has waned. She needs regular funds to pay for food, clothes, medicine. Since t is is exactly what Pattaya Orphanage Trust is good at, I hope we can help by adding Ban Tharn Namchai to the sponsorship programme. Sponsoring one of these lovely children will bring some kind people a lot of pleasure and the satisfaction of being surrogate members of this very special family which is Ban Tharn Namchai.

Today has been a travelling day, 10 hours in all, mostly waiting. Tomorrow is Ban Tharn Namchai. There were some technical difficulties with yesterday's post. If it doesn't appear I will rewrite tomorrow. Watch this space....

More about refugees..

My worst fears were not confirmed by the bean counters. By the time some allowances had been made our estimate of the cash available for the care of each child rose to the dizzy heights of five pounds and a few pence. This covers food, clothing health, education - everything. Not for a day, not even for a week, but for a whole, entire month.

Today there should be a picture of the camp if the technology works. There is also a picture of a lady from the SAW women's project learning to weave. This project helps women and children with HIV. They live in Thailand illegally, in conditions slightly better than the camps. This house and its people desperately need the help of a team of volunteers with paint, skills and a willingness to work. Money to improve the kitchen and the plumbing would be essential. Ten ladies and ten children would be eternally grateful.

Finally a word about school uniforms. We were told today that recently 22 children were returned to Burma in a group. This is too many to ransome back. We were told quite matter-of-factly that the boys would be impressed into the army as soldiers or porters. The girls would be 'Trafficked'. 'Trafficked' is a euphemism for sold into a brothel. Uniforms help children avoid arrest. Five pounds to buy a uniform seems like a great bargain. Five pounds a month to live on seems like an insult to humanity.

Umpium Camp

Umpium Camp clings to the hillside high in the mountains which separate Thailand from Burma. Someone said there are 10,000 bends in the road from Mae Sot which means I have been around 20,000 bends today, safely, thanks to our expert driver, Khun Aye. There's probably a joke in 20,000 bends. There are few jokes in Umpium.

It is a temporary shelter. This means no permanent buildings. Everything is made from bamboo , grass and palm. It must be a mudbath in the rainy season. There is no running water, no electricity, no floors to the main rooms. 10,000 people live here 'temporarily'. But for some temporary has stretched to 15 or 20 years.

We met 100 children in one of the boarding houses. Funds stretch only to 2 meals each day. The stories the children have to tell are heartrending. Almost all we spoke to were Karen and have been sent away for safety when their villages were raided by the Burmese army.

These kids have no shoes. They have only the clothes they stand up in. They have no toys. They have nothing like enough food. They have no medical care. They have no future.

They are welcoming, happy, smiling and generous.

I am not going to say what the budget is for their care, because we need to check the figures to make sure that our calculation is correct. If it is right, I promise you won't believe it is possible. But the kids are the living proof it is happening. If, of course, you call this living.

Photography is prohibited in the camp so I was not able to get anything on the mobile phone camera that really does the children justice. There will be some pictures tomorrow.

Visiting Paw Ray

Paw Ray is a remarkable lady. We met her yesterday as she celebrated International Children's Day outside the Has Thoo Lei School and Orphanage outside Mae Sot, on the Burmese border. She had cooked lunch for 3000 children. Normally the school holds 500, the Orphanage 160, but yesterday was special. The celebrations cloak a grimmer reality. Many of the children are malnourished. The school can afford to provide lunch for them (cost 8p) only twice per week children with no uniform may be arrested and returned to Burma as illegal immigrants. A uniform costs five pounds. More tomorrow.

People in this Blog

Kru O in action

The ladies from Helping Hands Pattaya - Bronwyn, Kylie and Rosanne - without whom there would be no POT involvement in the Lunch Farms or the Tsunami - and who are now helping us reach Burmese communities near Maesot.

Sally, me and some friends from the School for Deaf Children in Pattaya