WWM have a website!

Yes, we do. We'll no longer be posting to this blog - all new blog entries, and previous ones for that matter, can now be found at www.mywwm.org. Along with a host of other information, which we hope will stimulate some discussion and need for more information. We look forward to welcoming you to our new site and thank you for your continued interest and support. :)

Bronwyn, Rosanne & Kylie

WWM take on Chonburi Handicap Project

The Chonburi Handicap Project was started by Rosanne in January 2008 after the Governor of Chonburi Province in Thailand, where Rosanne lives, asked the public for assistance for the many handicapped people living in Chonburi who live in housing conditions unsuitable to their special requirements and who receive only B500 (USD15) per month to live on.

Working together with the Redemptorist Center of Pattaya (under the Father Ray Foundation) Rosanne has been able to visit the worst cases over the past year or more and help make a difference in the lives of 45 handicapped men, women and children by providing medical care, wheel chairs, hospital beds and building or repairing existing homes. Funds were raised with the help of local clubs, organisations and private citizen to make this possible.

The Chonburi Handicap Project has improved the lives of many Thai families who live in poverty and have the added responsibility of supporting a handicapped spouse, child or grandchild in our community. Women With a Mission is proud to continue the work of Rosanne and the Redemptorists and bring this project under our ‘umbrella of activities’.

Catching up on the blog, again...

Wednesday was our last day to visit some of the learning centres (schools) under the BMWEC umbrella. Our task - to talk to them about expansion of the mushroom house project and a visit in September this year with a group of Friends of WWM. Our first learning centre visit was to the big centre of 700 children, Hsa Thloo Lei. We needed to organise video footage for a short film about the school for a sponsor in the UK. We watched the filming of both the junior and senior assemblies. The little ones sang us some songs and we, of course, sang for them. Note to selves - need to improve our performance! We also saw the senior students harvesting mushrooms and working in the vegetable garden.

From here we headed off to Hway Ka Loke Learning Centre and boarding house, a half hour from Mae Sot, which in our notes from from 18 months ago was noted as having 130 children and now has over 320 students. We talked with the assistant headmaster who agreed the centre and boarding house would benefit greatly from a mushroom house, talked to the children and some volunteers who are helping at this centre and visited the boarding house where the little children were in 'kindergarten'. Carrying in tins of biscuits was a sure way to disrupt the proceedings... and we were glad we did. Little children dressed in rags, with no shoes, needed something special to brighten their day. Committing to revisit this school in September to spend some time and do a few activities, we left to then visit Nam Tok Learning Centre.

While the children of Nam Tok had a day off for parent teacher meetings, which were to include discussion of swine flu, we talked to the head master about locating a mushroom house here . He had already heard that his Centre may have one, so bingo... the location was already marked out! We enjoyed his enthusiasm and assured him we'll do our best to ensure a mushroom house is built at his school. He also shared with us other 'income generating projects' set up to assist the learning center, such as a leaf used for consumption of what we think is, or at least similar to, betel-nut. The leaf will be sold to the community to generate funds to subsidise the income for the Learning Center.

Continuing on to Future Garden Learning Center, a small center set in the middle of corn fields, we found them also keen to have a mushroon house to help feed the children their lunches as well as selling them to the local market to help add protein to their existing lunches. As an aside, the day of our visit the center had been without water for 10 days due to roadworks on the highway. It had got so bad - 10 days without water for cooking or bathing - that some of the teachers and older students had started to go and assist with the roadworks so they could be finished. Last word was the water was expected to be completed the next day...

Our final Learning Center visit was to Thoo Mwey Khee Boarding House and Learning Center, which has over 300 students - half of which are living at the boarding house. This Center, close to the border has leased land with the assistance of Global Neighbors Canada Inc to develop a farm to help support their food and running costs. Several different NGO's are working together to set up a sustainable Centre for educating and boarding migrant children whose parents are in extremely difficult circumstances. It is an amazing place, and the headmaster, Pway Doh, inspires us with his enthusiasm. A definate place for a mushroom house. Or two...

A travelling day...

The post for our last day in Mae Sot is delayed. We have travelled today back to Bangkok... and sitting down to write the post, an excellent documentary on Burma is on TV5Monde. We hope some of you may have seen it... We will finish the blog on Monday.

Down to Umphang to Du Pla Ya Boarding House

This adventure started Monday with a phone call from our friend who lives in Mae Sot, who was coming with us to Umphium Refugee Camp. She phoned to say the transport was organised but not ideal. Immediate alert! OK to go, but we would have to take the local bus to come back. This is a one and half hour of narrow winding roads through a spectacular mountain range. So we sprang to action, hired a 4WD vehicle and called back to say situation sorted! Tuesday started at 7am to leave for the market to buy fruit, milk and noodles for the children we arrived at the appointed destination to meet with the rest of the gang going to the camp to find no-one there - OK, time to have breakfast afterall.

The scenery down to Umphium is breathtaking, although travel sick tabs are required if you suffer from travel sickness. We arrived at the camp, signed in and were waved through. As always seeing so many people living in such cramped conditions has a large impact, but the rainy season amplifies the effect. Built as temporary accommodation 20 years ago the camp is continually undergoing repair and renovation. Recently the rules have changed to allow these temporary bamboo shelters to have concrete floors and footings. We were pleasantly surprised to find the funds we had sent earlier in the year to repair the canteen roof had stretched to cover the cost of a concrete floor for the dining room and kitchen at Du Pla Ya.

We met with the boarding house leader - a wonderfully compassionate woman who also cares for 20 children in her own home within the camp. We were also joined by Room to Grow Foundation who also partially fund this boarding house and we discussed future plans for working together to provide full support for Du Pla Ya.

Mushroom houses...

For those of you who may not know what an Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus Ostreatus) house in Thailand looks like, here's a photo of the inside of one. This particular mushroom hut has 1,000 spore bags and the mushrooms grown help to feed nearly 300 children and teachers at Hsa Thoo Lei Boarding House in Mae Sot. Thai Children's Trust have sponsored this house with great results. Twelve students from grade 9 to 11 and a teacher are involved in the cultivation and today's conversations with them confirm for us that they are very happy to have a change from their regular diet! They're able to harvest enough mushrooms for one meal every two days. Once the project has been established a little longer the idea is to sell the extra produce in the local market with proceeds being used to purchase more spore bags (the bags generally produce for between 4 and 6 months), make repairs to the mushroom house when needed and buy other food, for example, meat, fish paste and rice. The cost of a mushroom house this size is B40,000 or AUD1,500 (approx) or USD1,200 (approx). We've been looking at other migrant schools today - looking for motivated school directors and interested teachers that will be happy to take on a mushroom house. And we think we found a few. :)

Catching up on our blog...

On Sunday we had a catch up day and a visit to the border market on the Moei River which forms the border between Thailand and Burma, where many young Burmese children live in the area and survive the best they know how with little support. On our way back from the market we visited a Wat where Burmese migrants are living. After hearing their tragic stories, we gave a small donation and handed out balloons to the children - which meant we rode off (yes, we're on bicycles!) to the sounds of 'squeaking' balloons and giant smiles. :)

On Monday we rode our bikes to Hsa Thoo Lei Learning Centre, dodging rainstorms and pot holes, disposable raincoats flapping. The route, which normally takes 15 minutes to drive took 3/4 hour, so slightly damp, and very windswept we arrived. Hsa Thoo Lei is one of the migrant learning centres in Mae Sot, educating over 700 children, nearly 300 of these living in the boarding house attached to the centre. Our focus was to meet with some of the administrative staff to talk about the projects WWM are currently running, and possible new ones, and to be updated on the current situation. All discussions here now are focused on how the fighting inside Burma is causing hundreds of children to flee across the border, accompanied only by their teachers. While it has been reported in the newspapers here that thousands are fleeing into Thailand, the plight of the children is not mentioned. Everyone who works with children here are scrambling to find money for food, blankets, water, clothing and medicines. Small school boarding houses along the border are finding their numbers are rapidly increasing since the fighting along the border has increased in intensitity. We've made plans to visit some of these schools on Wednesday. We finished our meeting having established a plan to increase Hsa Thoo Lei's library with English language books, visited the new mushroom house, and discussed the possibility of the girls crocheting christmas stars, and making bracelets which will be used to fund raise by EMPOWA back in Australia.

Our blogging irregularities....

We've been experiencing great difficulties in accessing the internet for three days now and want to let the few readers we have know that we're thinking of you and have been writing our blog but just not being able to post. So anyhow, now that it appears to be up and running we'll give it another go. :)

Grace Boarding House & Orphanage

OK, so the hard way to find out for sure what time the border opens to foreigners is to wake up at 5:30am, scoff breakfast and race to the border to be there at 6:30am (previously believed opening time) only to find out it's not open until 8:00am! Hmmm... After skulking around the streets for an hour or so, making friends with the locals and a word or two with the motorcycle taxi guys, Immigration opened and we were the first across the border. The early bird catches the worm. :)

We were a bit worried that we'd not be able to see the children before they left for school now that we were later than planned, but waiting to meet us on the other side was the boarding house mother for Grace Boarding School & Orphanage who had arranged to hold the kids back for as long as she could until we arrived. Avoiding the touts whilst appearing to be the regular type of tourist, we piled into the back of a songteaw (pick-up) and made a dash to the boarding house before the kids left. Arriving in time, we met all the 57 children before the first group left for school and shared some time with the rest of them until they went off to school. They sang for us some Christian songs in English and we treated them to our renditions of Baa Baa Black Sheep and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Both of which we struggled with the words. Bron finished off with a moving performance of All Things Bright and Beautiful.

We took some quick group photos and more of the kids crammed into a songteaw heading to school. They're in need of a lot of things at Grace Boarding House & Orphanage - food, (their main meal of the day is at lunch time, the other two meals are rice and fish sauce - seriously), salaries for carers, (currently they earn B1,500 per month - approximately USD34), toys, library books, (they have a book case but no books) and they'd love a truck so that they can transport the kids to school and no longer pay the B8,000 per month that would be better off spent on food for the children.

Grace Boarding House & Orphanage do currently receive some sponsorship from Singapore and parents contribute a bag of rice whenever they can (no rice during June to October, it's planting time), however it's impossible to feed, house, clothe, educate and provide medical treatment to 57 kids with funds received for 30. What Grace Boarding House & Orphanage needs immediately is funds. For just over B18,000 a year per child, all these needs can be met. That's the equivalent of approximately AUD60 per month, or USD45.

If you'd like to help let us know. We are happy to work with you to ensure your interests are met and your contribution is a best fit.

Quick Update...

After two very big days and 10 hours on the road, we arrived in Mae Sot late this afternoon. We're weary so will keep this post short. We have a free day tomorrow where we'll aim to update you all with news from the past two days. In the meantime, here's a picture we took while waiting for the border to open for foreigners. Before this, we'd had lengthy discussions between ourselves about sitting directly on the pavement, bought disposable raincoats to sit on and then promptly sat in the gutter with our friends without a second thought.

Mae Sai

After flying from Bangkok to Chiang Rai, two friends from World Education collected us from the airport and drove us to the northern border town of Mae Sai, just a short hour away. A bowl of delicious noodle soup from the mobile soup stall outside the hotel was all we needed before falling into bed. The choice of meat for the soup included chicken feet, beaks and all other parts of a chicken. Fortunately the maker of the soup decided we were thigh meat ladies and left out the entrails, beaks and feet! Tomorrow we're up at 5:30am for the border crossing.

Another trip in planning...

Preparations are underway for a trip to Mae Sot to visit 'our kids' at Du Pla Ya Boarding House, though we'll travel first to Mae Sai, a border town in northern Thailand, to meet 50 or so children aged between 6 and 16 at an orphanage that is without funding this year. We were first told about them by World Education, Thailand, who help where they can with educational materials (and trying to find a new sponsor) but just don't have all the funds necessary to feed, house and clothe these kids - so we're going to see what we can do. We hear the children are mostly Wa children who come from areas where there are no schools, meaning they live away from their families; if they have them. At the very least, it should prove to be an interesting journey...

We started the day at the border market on what we thought would be the quietest day of trip! Whilst we did enjoy the market very much, we'd heard about the children living under the bridge but seeing them brought home the harsh reality of their lives. We're happy to know they receive some support and care from another group operating out of Mae Sot.

Back in town we had lunch at Bai Fern, which was delicious, though we should have allowed a bit more time. It's worth mentioning that two of the best handicraft shops that we've come across, WEAVE and Borderline are closed on Sundays. Or at least they were today! :)

The afternoon was spent visiting an orphanage for toddlers and babies and a home for women and children living with HIV. There's always a great need for volunteers in these places (so much so that one of us was 'carried away' within minutes of arriving by a group of 3 year olds heading to the nearest open parkland to blow bubbles!), that if you're interested in knowing how you can volunteer and/or help otherwise, just let us know.

We shared dinner tonight with 48 teachers and 200 students aged between 4-18 at a boarding house and learning center for refugees and immigrants. Two groups of students performed an hour of traditional Karen dancing, which they had been practicing for the past two months. Their obvious pride in their culture brought tears to our eyes and we felt very priviledged to witness their passion and energy.

Back to Mae Sot

Yesterday we travelled with Thai Children's Trust to Mae Sot from Bangkok, which was somewhat of a long and bumpy 6hrs by minivan! A delicious Burmese curry at Casa Mia and a good night's sleep at Phannu Guesthouse, saw us ready for another day.