Saturday: Mae Tao Clinic

Eighty percent of prosthetics fitted at the Mae Tao Clinic are land mine victims.  Men, women and children.

The clinic is an amazing place.  An assault of noise and heat, with patients and prospective patients waiting patiently in rows outside clinics and admissions offices.  A higgledy-piggeldy cluster of buildings, which has emerged over time on the basis of necessity and possibility rather than any grand master plan.  The clinic serves around 160,000 patients each year, half each from the Burmese migrant population in Thailand and from within Burma itself.  The recent fighting on the other side of the border has affected the numbers of patients.  At the time of the fighting in Myawaddy, about a mile away, there was a stream of gunshot injuries.  Since then, the normal stream of less urgent cases has been depressed by the closure of the border locally: the 'Friendship Bridge' has been closed officially since July.  But this week a couple of  surgeons from UK are performing opthalmic surgery, and there are long queues of people formed to take advantage of their skill.  Those in urgent need have managed to find places to cross irrespective of risk.

We have an hour or more with Dr Cynthia Maung, the gentle but impressive founder of the clinic and its associated projects.  Our interest is in the Dry Food Program, which is intended to supply basic foodstuffs to children in boarding houses at migrant schools.  Generally speaking these children have come to Thailand for an education which they cannot access inside Burma, and they have no close family in the area.  They may be orphans, or their parents may still be inside Burma.  The program is supposed to provide six basic foods to the children - rice, oil, beans, fish, salt and sweet powder.  This is the bare minimum on which the children can survive, but not enough for them to thrive.  Numbers of children have grown, and prices of food are high, so at present the standard ration is two items - rice and oil*.  The figures for 2011 are stark.  There are about 3000 children in the boarding houses eligible for help from Mae Tao Clinic.  The cost of the six basic ration items is about 350 Thai baht (£7 uk) per month. Total cost per month about one million baht (£21,000).  Total annual budget about 12 million baht.  Budget forcast to be available is only 8 million baht, including, we hope, two million from Thai Children's Trust.  That leaves a shortfall of one third of the minimum sum required to give these children an inadequate diet.  The world seems to have turned its back on these migrant children, and to have lost interest in them, their welfare and their education.  We have not, but what we can do to help is so pitifully small in relation to the scale of the problems.

In the afternoon we visited the SAW children, a happy, noisy, joyous bunch of 50 children who live in a three bedroomed suburban villa with their care staff.  It is overcrowded, and the neighbours don't much like the noise.  But the children are happy and healthy and very obviously well cared for.

Once a teacher, always a teacher, Ruth Flanagan got stuck in to some serious play.  See above.

* Mae Tao Clinic point out that the ration situation in December was redeemed by a generous donation of fish paste, beans and other items.