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. :)