“We are the world, we are the children,

We are the ones who make a brighter day,

So let’s start giving.

There’s a choice we’re making,

We’re saving our own lives,

It’s true we’ll make a better day,

Just you and me.”

     Thinking about my last week, I couldn’t even smile because I visited some schools and listened to the children’s stories. Before I started working with R2G, I didn’t hear a lot about the Burmese migrant children’s lives even though I used to be a teacher in Good Morning School.  I knew just a small group of children in Mae Sot before but now I know a lot more than that. I felt sorry for the children and I was so sad too. However, I learned a lot things about children in my first work experience with R2G.

When I stepped onto “Heavenly Home” orphanage grounds, it was so silent and I didn’t hear any sounds or voice of the children. I thought that maybe they were sleeping but when I saw them, they just got up from their beds and they looked at us very curiously. I went to this home with our programme manager in the afternoon and she told me everything about it. When I saw the children who live at Heavenly Home, I didn’t realize they are orphans because they are so cute and adorable.  Meanwhile, some kind of query appeared in my mind like how their parents can leave them.

Heavenly Home is one of the orphanages  in Mae Sot and there are about 50 children. Most of the children are from Mae Tao Clinic where they are left by their parents and some of them are orphans. When they saw me for the very first time, they looked like a little bit shy and they didn’t talk to me. I tried to have a chat with them like asking their names and some kind of question to build their trust.  However, they couldn’t tell their names because they are so young and all about 1 year old but they still tried to chat with me. They really liked to take photos and asked me like “Woo, u…” and pointed to the camera. It was quite funny and I interpreted their answers by myself like “what is this “.I noticed that they don’t have a lot toys to play with, how it was sad but I am very glad to hear that R2G is providing them some weekly activities to have fun and will hopefully give some support to these children to go to Thai schools. I realize that R2G will be a great partner with Heavenly Home very soon. I feel really great being a part of R2G and I am deeply honored to work with R2G.

As migrant and refugee children in Mae Sot start preparing to go back to school after the summer break, Room to Grow’s new programme year is also beginning – with two new additions:

First, we’re pleased to announce our latest partner, Heavenly Home, an orphanage and day-care centre for fifty young children. Room to Grow has been running weekly well-being sessions there since April, and has just received funds to start deliveries of yellow beans and eggs, thanks to ONE (Singapore). Find out more about Heavenly Home on our current projects page – click here.

Second, there are some changes to the team in Mae Sot. After exceptional work with Room to Grow over the past two years, Nobel has been promoted to Programme Manager. Congratulations! We’ve also hired a new Programme Assistant –  Thae Thae Khoo – from one of the local community development schools. This is what Thae Thae says about herself:

After finishing school in Burma, I decided to move to Thailand where my mum was already living. I really wanted to stay with my family because I had been away from them for 3 years. My first experience of living in Mae Sot was at a school and boarding house.  I spent a month helping my mum who was a teacher there. However, I didn’t feel safe illegally living in Mae Sot as a migrant so I moved to Umphiem refugee camp near Mae Sot. I went to the VT- Agriculture training school for a year. After that I felt very bored living without a job in the refugee camp so I started to think to do something. Since I had experience teaching and I was really interested to work in this field more, I decided to apply to work as a teacher in Good Morning School.  I spent a lot of time with the children by teaching and learning their stories. A year later, I wanted to improve my skills more therefore I became a student of Institute of Academic and Practical Studies (Build Project). Through I am learning at IAPS, I have also had a great time with all my teachers and friends and I have learnt a lot of things. However, I am a person who is always looking for new experience so I have become a part of Room to Grow. I believe that children should be free from fear or any kind of oppression, able to access education freely and have the right to be secure in any situation. I want to learn a lot and be able to help children throughout my life. 

With our team and partners in Mae Sot expanding, it looks like this will be a good year for Room to Grow. We hope that you’ll continue to follow our blog and share it with us!

My Easter this year was a little different than most years. Instead of the usual church service and family hunt for chocolate eggs around the garden, I was invited to celebrate with another family, a family of 100 children who are boarders at Agape school. When I arrived, all the children were sitting on the floor looking expectantly at David, the headteacher. I struggled to understand all of the Burmese, but then suddenly the kids all shouted together ‘sa:me!’ – ‘we’ll eat!’ David was telling them the programme for the morning, and the most important bit for them was the same as for children everywhere – getting to eat their Easter egg.

The service was beautiful. Each person was given a hard-boiled egg to write their prayer or wish for the coming year, with the teachers helping the youngest children who aren’t so good at writing yet. Then, we were all given a candle to hold while we prayed. Not all the children at Agape are Christian, so each was encouraged to pray according to their own religion, or just to make a wish if they preferred. One hundred children holding tiny white candles – yet not the hint of fuss, no accidental burns or hair caught on fire. We sang and prayed, then arranged our eggs and candles on a table at the front of the hall….

 …and then finally, the moment the children had all been waiting for – their very  own Easter egg. It was hard-boiled, not chocolate, and there was just one – probably far fewer than children in the West now get – but it bought such a look of excitement and happiness to their faces. A present that tastes delicious and is good for you too – what more can you ask for?

Room to Grow supports regular deliveries of eggs to Agape and other boarding houses in the migrant community here in Mae Sot. Many children tell us that eggs are their favourite food, and they’re also a great source of protein and nutrients – vital in combating the malnutrition that affects so many children here. It costs less than 200 baht to give a child an egg every week for one year. That’s about $6 CAD or £4 – the price of one chocolate egg. Could you organise a fundraiser or make a donation to help us get eggs to more children every week, not just at Easter?

Take a look at Room to Grow’s 2011 Annual Report, with lots of photos and information about our accomplishments last year.

From January to December 2011, Room to Grow’s support helped to feed and shelter over 1,350 children at 14 schools and boarding houses, as well as helping nearly a thousand more children on a more limited basis.

Highlights from the year include:

-       supporting 48 children from SAW Safehouse and New Blood Boarding House to attend Thai school

-       holding our third Forgotten Birthdays party for 150 children from Agape Orphanage and Learning Centre

-       feeding lunch to approximately 975 students every school day from June to December, thanks to our partner Thai Children’s Trust’s Big Give campaign. That’s a total of 129,235 meals! 85 boarding house children also received daily breakfast and dinner through the same programme

-       holding two nutrition training workshops for over 40 boarding house cooks and teachers, many of whom had received no previous education on nutrition

In 2011, Room to Grow was sad to say goodbye to Jennifer Jones, a founding member who has been working on the ground for the Foundation since it began in 2007. Jennifer will continue to be involved on Room to Grow’s board of directors, and we wish her all the best with her studies in Australia. In her place, Joanna Flint and Sandra Jones joined Room to Grow in November 2011 as Programme Co-ordinator and Executive Director respectively.

With Easter and Songkran nearly upon us, it’s time not just to look back at the successes of 2011, but forward to our plans for the new 2012 school year in June. Watch this space for blog entries on our current construction projects – a boarding house at Shwe Tha Zin and a nursery at Sky Blue. We look forward to a successful year, with more rice and yellow beans, more lunches, nutrition training, playing and having fun with our children. We hope that you will continue to support Room to Grow and to share this year with us.

It happens all the time, right? Somewhere in the world, sometime (like NOW!), something messed up is going on. Many of us are so thankful for all of our modern technologies – great! – we can learn about disasters as they are happening. How exciting. (Or how heart wrenching.) And it’s just so typical that it’s always the places that are already messed up, yes, they are the ones that get hit. You  know, yearly flooding in Bangladesh, oh earthquake in the Philippines, I can’t even keep track of it all. It just seems like it keeps happening to the same kind of people again and again – those already down on their luck. And it so happened that, just before lunchtime on the 23rd of February, Umphium Mai hit the messed-up jackpot.

They believe that it was just a result of a simple kitchen fire, cooking up the TBBC food rations that were distributed the day before, that a fire quickly spread out of control and overtook many sections of the camp, due to the dry conditions and wind in the mountains, and destroyed nearly a thousand homes, 2 nursery school, some mosques, and other buildings.  Can you believe that? Almost a THOUSAND homes. Unreal.

And it’s just so typical that is happens in a place like this. A refugee camp. Do these people need any more hardships? I think we also know the answer to that ridiculously rhetorical question.

Now, this is a protracted refugee situation, meaning, it basically isn’t going anywhere. Yes, some of the residents resettle to third countries, and we all ‘ooh and aah’ about that, but so many more don’t go anywhere. If they do, they are just replaced by like others. I remember teaching in the camp, this was in 2004-5, and when my student told me she was actually born in the camp, I was floored. I couldn’t imagine that. There are many people in the camps there who were born there, are raised there, and remain there, day after day after day after day. Not moving forward, not moving backwards, barely moving sideways, just existing on the brink of what, I don’t know. They live on the aid of NGOs who exist on the ‘aid’ of country’s governments, all trying to make some sliver of a difference to improve these people’s lives. And they do, I really believe they do. I would not have gone out there and eventually worked for one of those NGOs otherwise.  And I would not have become involved with co-founding Room to Grow Foundation either, if I hadn’t thought that small things CAN make a difference in people’s lives.

Now, it also just so happens that we started Room to Grow because of a fire in camp. Can you believe that? Luckily that fire was small, in that it only (ONLY!!) burnt down one boys’ dormitory. This was a boys’ dorm for students who were either orphaned or separated from their families, and had no one in camp. The didn’t qualify for the meager rations offered to other camp residents. They subsisted on a little bit of donated(borrowed from or lent by their carers) rice, beans and chili, and that’s it! No vegetables! Ok, well, they sometimes ate vegetables but they had to basically escape from camp and go forage for it themselves. And when they were doing that, they had no time for their studies. And did poorly in school…and so on..it was just a bad cycle and a pitiful situation. We had found out about it from some of our students and we (myself, Jen Jones and together with Su Ann Oh) went to check it out, assess the situation. Long story short, the inception of Room to Grow Foundation began. It was an exciting time. We not only got to directly help – and improve the quality of life  for – those students, but it also sprung us onto 2 more projects in one of the northern camps. And from there it grew.

So, this is why hearing this terrible news of this terrible fire brought such strong emotions to me. Partially because I used to walk those exact roads every week in camp, and knew those places well. And partially because, after 5 years in operation, soon Room to Grow will no longer be working on in-camp projects (instead deepening our focus on the migrant communities), this is our last chance to easily and directly help and impact the lives of the refugees in camp, in their time of need, just as we started out doing 5 years ago.  Like many other things in life, this too has come full circle. Our last ‘Hurrah’. Except it’s not happy. It’s just our chance to help out again, and even say thank you to the people of Umphium, for accepting our little organization, and for working so kindly with us for these past years. I hope we made a difference in some of their lives.

As this disaster was so sudden, we are trying our best to organize things and coordinate with other organizations who regularly work in camp, so that we can continue to provide material support to the fire survivors. We have been able to provide some clothes and household items to camp and hope that we can send more in the coming days.

It’s just terrible to think that these people, who live in camp with basically NOTHING (look around your home and subtract 98%), just got it taken away from them. The old question, ‘What would you take if your house was burning down?” could have been asked to them. They would have thought back to when they had to flee their village due to fighting, or when enemy soldiers took over their home, or even burnt it down, when they had to leave in a hurry, or when they just decided to leave had to trek 2 days through mountains and jungle to get to the camp. They would have thought about those valuable things they had taken into camp. Those same things that are now just gone forever. All in the space of 2 minutes.

Life is cruel. But we can help. Little things make a tremendous difference. You can help.

Please give us your pocket change.

In 2011-2012 academic year, R2G and TCT provided six mushroom huts and 19,850 spore bags at eight programs. We supply mushroom spore bags to every program three months a round, and there are four rounds a year. Every program got large amount of mushrooms in each round as well as getting a lot of knowledge, creative ideas and income from the mushroom project. Two programs are in Mae La Ma plantation areas, five programs are near Mae Sot and one program is in Umpiem Refugee camp.

All programs provide mushrooms to boarding students as well as providing for the day students who come to the school during the week. Children like mushrooms, so cooks from each program cook mushrooms in many different ways such as making tempura mushrooms, fried mushrooms with morning glory, mushroom salad and mushroom soup.

Besides, children benefited a lot from the mushroom project through gaining participation skills, leadership skills and critical thinking skills. Some boarding children from Hsa Mu Htaw have a new idea to grow mushrooms with car tyres. At the same time, they also have some ideas to sell tempura mushrooms at the Sunday market (walking street market) every Sunday. Because of the mushroom project, children have a lot of creative ideas to make more income for their boarding houses.

New Blood School post-ten students also have new idea to make their own mushroom hut.  So, they will get knowledge about growing mushrooms and project management skills as well as getting income for their food and school funds.

These are good and creative ideas to get income for the boarding houses as well as gaining experience by running the mushroom projects. By supporting children’ ideas, it will be very helpful for children’s practical lives and it will be useful for the boarding house leaders as well.

In December, the Early Learning Center sent 235 blankets, 4000 toothbrush and toothpaste sets, 37 towels, some toys, clothing and babies’ things to R2G. We delivered these to nine programs that we work with. This season is so cold, and children need more blankets. Most of the students from each program don’t have toothbrushes either. ELC’s donation of blankets and toothbrushes was so beneficial for the students. We have some toothbrushes left, so R2G is going to provide them again in the next three months as well as giving them to the other programs we work with.

One program is in Mae La camp, and it is so cold there during winter. Children from that program didn’t have enough blankets before. When we delivered the blankets to them, they all were so happy. Likewise, one of the other programs doesn’t have thick walls in one of the dormitories. So during winter, it is very windy and children who sleep in that building can’t sleep well. The head teacher said,

“When children got the blankets from R2G, they all were happy and they said that they got thick and warm blankets, so they can sleep and study well now. They use them not only for sleeping but also for studying.”

When we delivered tooth brushes to one program, they said they don’t have toothbrushes, and they brush their teeth with charcoal. They also don’t know how to use toothbrushes. So, we demonstrated to them how to use a toothbrush. One of the students said,

“This is the first time that I have had a toothbrush, and I don’t know how to use it. I always use charcoal to brush my teeth.”

He also said that he lives near the landfill and some of his family use charcoal to brush their teeth, while others don’t brush their teeth at all. So, providing toothbrushes and education how to use a toothbrush is so important for children who have never used one in their lives.

R2G would like to thank ELC for sending the blankets and toothbrushes for the children who we work with. It was so useful for the children who didn’t have enough blankets and who have never used toothbrushes in their lives. Our children now have clean teeth and healthy, warm and happy lives in the classrooms. Thanks ELC!

Yesterday was one of those rare days that overflows with blessings.

In the morning, a truck pulled up at the office and unloaded about 200 blankets, 4000 toothbrushes and several boxes of assorted goods (towels, children’s clothes, baby’s items, toys). We got to sweating unloading them all from the truck and stacking them inside the office, but I couldn’t help but laughing out loud several times during the process. It was like Santa had arrived with his sleigh only it wasn’t Santa, it was the kids who attend the Early Learning Centre - a group of schools for children in Bangkok.  Before leaving for the holidays, students there brought in blankets for less privileged children and their combined efforts resulted in Santa’s sleigh arriving in Mae Sot yesterday.

In all the giving, I particularly noticed three boxes marked from Jack and Grace. These two children provided three boxes full of goods for children and it looks like they raided their house to do so. They cleaned out their closet, provided toys, both new and used, and filled three boxes full of presents for children they had never met before.

The day of giving wasn’t even finished yet. In the afternoon we stopped by the post office and came home with three very large boxes from Sister Maria Goretti Catholic Primary School in the UK.  The boxes were full of gifts brought in by students there and sent off by mail to us here on the border. The boxes had fun things inside like toys and games, but also practical and very needed school supplies, such as pencils and notepaper. Both gifts will be well received by children here.

They say that there is no gift like giving – but what I know is true is that very little lights up my heart like seeing other people give, especially when they give from their hearts. To see so many children giving to other children at a time when a lot of kids are excited about getting gifts is such a beautiful thing. And to know that this Christmas a lot of children who receive very little at all for most of the year will be opening some presents – it all made for a very beautiful day.

The Room to Grow team will be heading out to several boarding houses in the next few days, to share the holiday celebrations and to distribute the wonderful gifts that we have received from our friends in Thailand and the UK. We hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, lit up by the joy of giving and recieving and full of laughter, love and smiles.

Happy Holidays from Room to Grow!