In August this year, Room to Grow received a request for assistance from Ler Doh dormitory, in Mae La Refugee Camp. The dormitory houses 59 students, most of whom left their families inside Burma to seek and education and is in the second year of operations.

The dormitory was originally set up as an ‘emergency dormitory’ for students who had no family or friends to stay with in the camp. For the most part the students come from Burma, in Karen state. While the students’ educational and economic backgrounds are quite varied, they are all committed to education. Initially, it was thought that only thirty students would come, however the number increased to fifty, and this year there are 59 students.

The boarding house was experiencing an unusually high number of malaria and dengue fever cases among the students in June and July. Both diseases are mosquito-born and can be easily prevented by sleeping under mosquito nets. Unfortunately, mosquito nets were something the dormitory didn’t have and couldn’t afford.

The dormitory was also in need of blankets for the children staying there, and we were able to provide funds for those also. This is a message from the caregiver at Ler Doh Dormitory:

“The students are ever so grateful for these materials. In particular the mosquito nets provide much needed prevention from malaria and dengue fever. Reports for August tell us that all students are healthy.”

The students at Ler Doh dorm would like to say a big Thank You everyone who supports Room to Grow from their cozy blankets, under their safe mosquito nets. We, in turn, would like to wish them good health and good luck on their upcoming exams!

Last month, there was a large birthday party at one of the migrant schools in Mae Sot. The headmistress celebrated her birthday and provided cakes to every child also celebrating their birthday on the same day. There were about twenty cakes in all and over a hundred people came to the ceremony. Among those invited were the children from Agape school and they performed a beautiful song wishing everyone a happy birthday, then sat quietly in the crowd watching the celebrations and watching the lucky children eat their cake.

I sat next to David, Agape’s headmaster, for most of the ceremony. They get invited to sing at a lot of ceremonies but suddenly I wondered how many people came to their birthday parties.

“How many children know when their birthday is?” I whispered to David.

“Almost none of them,” he replied. “Some don’t know how old they are at all.”

“Have they ever had a birthday party?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “Do you think they would like one?”

“I think most children at Agape have never had a birthday party or a birthday cake,” David said. “But I think they would really, really, really like one.”

So that settled it. We began planning.

And now it’s time to invite you to join us for the Forgotten Birthdays Party. We are going to be celebrating 51 birthdays on October 31st and we’d love for you to join us in whatever way you can.

Our goal is to make the day as special as we can for each individual child. We are celebrating the birthday of 50 children (the 51st birthday is my own), aged 2 years to 14 years. We’ll be providing each child with a cake of their own, with their name on it in icing. I’d also like to give each child a small gift and a birthday card. If you have time to send even a home made card, a small note, some stickers – anything you think would be special for a child, I know these contributions will be warmly appreciated.

Please send cards and gifts to: PO Box 96. Mae Sot, Tak. Thailand. 63110.

Please join us for the celebration on the afternoon of October 31st, if you are able. We will be playing games, eating food, singing songs and doing a little dancing and the more the merrier. Contact me for more information. An invitation with a map will be available soon (jjones@roomtogrowfoundation.org)

Happy birthday to all!

R2G Children’s Foundation is now officially registered with the Government of Canada as a Charity!! Our status came through on June 15th, 2009. We are now able to issue official tax receipts for all donations we receive.

Although we usually go by the name of Room to Grow Foundation our officially registered name is: R2G Children’s Foundation and our official charitable number is:

85672 6625 RR0001

Our offices are located at 2141 Batten Road, Golden, B.C. Canada. V0A-1H1. This is also a great place to send checks made out to “R2G Children’s Foundation.”

Because this process has taken an inordinately long amount of time, our Paypal account has been limited until we were awarded the charitable status. Paypal is now reviewing our documents and we hope to have that up and available to accept donations again soon.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@roomtogrowfoundation.org

For 2 years now, we have been working as an organisation – Room to Grow Foundation – supporting children in refugee camps and in migrant areas, as well as in Burma with basic necessities: food, blankets, shoes, mosquito nets.

What have we achieved so far?

@ Up to 200 children receiving food (vegetables, meat, eggs) regularly
@ The set-up of Moon Dorm, that is wholly managed and funded by Room to Grow
@ Charity status in Canada
@ Partnerships with local organisations: the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO), the SAW safe house among others
@ Partnerships with international organisations: World Education, Thailand; Raffles Junior College students, Singapore; Westminster Presbytarian Church, Canada among others

This would not have been possible without the help of
@ Jonathan – our web specialist
@ Susie – our marketing and fundraising advisor
@ Erika – our nutrition advisor
@ Our many donors and supporters

Thank you everyone for your continued support.

In light of our upcoming fundraising campaigns, underwear has been on my mind a lot.  Before you think anything crude, one of our upcoming campaigns is for underwear.  Not for me, thanks, I have lots.  But have you ever wondered what orphaned or unaccompanied refugees and migrants wear under their clothes?  Is it anything at all?  And if nothing, how do they feel?  The same way you or I would feel when going solo? Or would it not bother them at all?

And if you had five bucks to:

a)    Buy food

b)    Buy underwear

c)     Buy shoes

d)    Buy a roof over your head

e)    Buy a blanket

Which would you choose to spend your fiver on first?   Would you buy food before underwear?

Probably.  But that doesn`t mean you wouldn`t want to wear underwear, does it?  It just means you might have some different priorities. 

At Room to Grow Foundation, some of the funding we have acquired has gone towards supplying underwear in the past, but not for every project.  Until we started working more with the projects, we didn`t realize just how important this small piece of material was, and so we tended to emphasize the other basic necessities.

We now see the error of our ways, and would now like to give ALL the children in the projects we support the opportunity to wear underwear.  We don`t want to see the underwear, we just want to know it`s there.

We`ll be calling on potential donors to help support this cause.  For the price of a pretty piece of lingerie from Victoria Secret, you can buy underwear for a child for ONE YEAR.

Photofriend is a project in which we give boarding house children digital cameras and ask them to take photographs. The children then use the photographs to tell us about what life is like as a separated or orphaned child living in a refugee camp. This year we’d like to expand the program to work with some boarding houses in the migrant community as well as in the refugee camp. Unfortunately we only have six cameras from our previous project, run in 2007.

We are putting out a call for used digital cameras. If you have upgraded in the last few years and still have some old digital cameras floating around, please consider contacting us. Memory cards are fairly inexpensive in Thailand, so all we need are cameras. In addition, if anyone has an old video camera lying around, digital or otherwise, we would really love to be able to have one for our blog posts and to make movies to send people.

Please spread the word and let us know if you think you can round up any cameras or videocameras. You can wrap them up and put them in the mail (feel free to use surface mail rather than air mail to save money) or contact us for more information about people we know who may be traveling to the region soon.

Thanks in advance for your help

The sun was hot and my hands were aching as I carried another bucket of cement from the mixing area to the foundations of the new girl’s dormitory building. Six children from the boarding house met me at the foundations, eagerly taking the buckets from my hands to do the most exciting job in their eyes, actually pouring the cement. I took the empty buckets from their hands and went back for another refill.

When we took a break and sat in the shade of the mango trees lining the property the boys didn’t sit still. They climbed the trees and searched for long poles to knock the fruit from the branches. The entire day I worked with them, they spent every moment of free time looking for something to eat and celebrating when they were successful. At the end of the day I was sun burnt and tired but we were all sweaty and dirty. The girl’s dormitory building, however, was a solid step closer to becoming a reality in time for the upcoming school year.

At the end of the day, we walked back together to the “old school”, the buildings that have been home to Agape for the last few years. Gradually, over the months of the hot season, while school is not in session, the volunteer workers and staff at the school and boarding house are building new structures on the land they now own, a few kilometers from their current location. But for now, the children spend their summer days in the old bamboo buildings, playing on a small patch of dirt that becomes a lake of mud during the rainy season.

Thanks to some generous donors, Agape was able this year to realize an important dream: purchasing land to call their own. The land is beautiful. Ringed by mango and tamarind trees there is space for the school and dormitory buildings, place for mushrooms, chickens and a garden, and most importantly, there is room for children to run and play and make noise.

For the first time, the children will be living in concrete structures that are built to last and every night when they go to sleep, they will sleep knowing that they have a home for as long as they need it. No landlord will evict them and no storm will bring the thatch down in the wind. The roof won’t leak and there won’t be holes in the floor.

Unfortunately this year, we only had enough funds raised to construct one dormitory building. This year, all the material from the two dormitories at the old school will be recycled in order to build the boy’s dormitory building on the new land. We’ll be fundraising later this year so that in March 2010, we’ll be ready to build the boys a real home and a safe place to stay.

When the buildings have been constructed, we’ll be posting more pictures here but in the meantime, on behalf of everyone at Agape, I’d like to thank our Christmas donors, who really made this dream come true.

On May 1st, Room to Grow will start working with its newest partner, Social Action for Women. Based in Mae Sot, SAW provides important services to the Burmese population living outside the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. Much of their work takes place in and around the factories where thousands of illegal Burmese workers attempt to make a living in sweatshop-like conditions.

In addition to operating six housing centres, SAW also runs an income generation program, a gender-based violence program, a health education program, and education program and a women’s exchange program. The health education program alone reaches out to over 20,000 people in the migrant community every year, indicating just how important the organization is to the local community here in Mae Sot.

SAW supports women and children in six housing centres in Mae Sot. They shelter children seeking an education from Burma’s Internally Displaced zones (IDP areas) and helps them go to school at one of their education programs. They shelter women in need at their Women’s Crisis Centre. This year they will open a shelter specifically for women and children who have been trafficked. They provide shelter and care to children with HIV and other health problems at their Health Care House. And finally, they have a safehouse for infants and young children who have been abandoned or whose parents have died. Many of the children in the safe house have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

On May 1st, we’ll be making our first delivery of rice to the SAW safehouse, where we will help to feed the 50 children who are there. Some are just newborns, others are as old as five. We’ll be providing rice to the safehouse every month and working to develop a program which will improve the children’s wellbeing. Check here for updates on the program, starting in June.

I have to say that although I like to move it, moving it in this heat is exhausting! Children, of course, are much less easily exhausted than their adult counterparts, even when the heat is high and especially when their favorite song is playing.

This week I started out singing some of our favorite songs (The Kids Go Walking One by One, and Go Banana! are a few) but I sensed a growing impatience. Kids started yelling things like “Ilikamuvamuva?”

So I caved and turned on the music. The madness begun and it didn’t end until I had sweat pouring down my back, my legs, and just about everywhere else. What can I say? Kids like to move it.

It’s Tuesday evening, I’ve just biked six kilometers into town from the border against a headwind, but I can’t wipe the smile off my face. There’s music playing in my head and the sound of laughter ringing in my ears.

Every week I visit Agape to lead activities with the children there. There are over a hundred children who go to school there during the day and when they finish class, the all pack into the largest classroom to sing with me. We usually sing and dance for about half and hour until their school bus comes. Then I spend time with the 50 children who remain and live at the school full time.

I’ve been traveling almost non stop since October so it’s been awhile since I could regularly run the program but the moment I started it up again it was like I’d never left. The children, the youngest being barely three, the oldest 14, remember all the songs and actions and can still do the Macarena without my help.

Last week I introduced a new dance to a new song: “I Like to Move it, Move it.”

The days in Thailand are getting hotter and hotter. Already the temperature breaks 35ºC most days but in April it will get hotter yet. Summer break has just begun, since it is now too hot for students to do anything but sit in a classroom and stew in their own sweat so when I arrived this week, the students were scattered around the playground, enjoying their new freedom after weeks of exams.

Rather than lead formal activities, I brought my little mp3 player and speakers out into the playground with me and started playing music. At first most of the children followed my lead and copied my actions but when I collapsed in a sweaty heap, they were having enough fun to continue on their own.

The last song before I left was their favorite. A young girl who had been sitting quietly the whole time on the tires suddenly lit up and started screaming, “I lika movup movup!”

Boys ran across the playground to caper in front of me. Soon a whole group of kids were dancing around, jumping up and down, waving their hands in the air and screaming. The fresh evening air was blowing across the fields from the border and the river, the sun was setting, and I have never seen anything more beautiful or inspiring in my life than the joy on their faces in that moment.

I like to move it, move it.