Don Bosco school donated funds to the Mae Na Chorn Children Home in Thailand

It all began when family Feyen from Belgium visited our Mae Na Chorn Children Home. They spent a couple of nights at the Hot Coffee Guesthouse, which is attached to the children home.
After their return to Belgium family Feyen gave a presentation about Thailand and the orphanage in the school of their daughters. The children of the school (between 6 and 12 years) collected some extra money by walking (sponsored by parents and friends) for the Mae Na Chorn children’s home. A big thank you to selfless efforts of both, the family Feyen and the Don Bosco School.

Children Camp in the remote village “Dulaper” in Northern Thailand

End of April the Raintree Foundation organized a children camp in Dulaper village. April is still in school holiday and the children are more than happy to take part in some fun activities. It was a three day camp with 250 children, the children that attended came from different churches and children homes. There was even a team from Canada that helped to organize workshops and other fun activities. Everybody enjoyed this event very much. A special thank you goes to all the people who contributed towards the success of it.

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Seminar for leaders of children homes

On May 19th the Raintree Foundation offered a seminar for childcare providers in the Mae Na Chorn children’s home. The theme of the seminar was “Identification of Child Abuse and Maltreatment”. We were able to teach 10 leadres who run children homes in the Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son provinces. The participants are all involved in childcare and greatly appreciated this seminar.

Child abuse is a widely spread problem all over the world. The economic situation sees parents having too little time to take care of children because of the need to earn sufficient money to meet family needs with their current low incomes. Poverty, divorce and the inability of families to take proper care of their children has worsened this situation. These children are most vulnerable because of their total dependency on adults. In these cases, poverty, broken families, domestic violence and negligence drive children to leave home and they may seek someone outside the home for emotional support, or children of low intellect can be easily lured into indecent practices.

The goal of this seminar was to create awareness regarding child abuse and give the participants some tools to handle children who have been abused. A special thanks goes to Peggy an Aftercare Consultant who was leading the seminar. She is working for the New Life Center Foundation in Chiang Mai.

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Safe drinking water for 127 Families in Phayao District, Chiang Mai, North Thailand

Two weeks ago the RainTree Foundation did the third follow up monitoring visit to a rural  village in Phayao area, where 127 units of sustainable BioSand Filters have been donated by the Rotary Club of Coquitlam in 2011. The people in the village are mainly rice farmers and depend on clean drinking water. Before this project the villagers had lots of difficulties to access safe drinking water and many were often sick, especially the elderly and the children. Altogether we were able to check on 106 out of the 127 units. The usage of the filter is about 93% and the other 7% are used only seasonal. That’s a fantastic result and was a great encouragement to us.

The village people highly appreciate the sustainable water filters. Below are some statements of the villagers:

• “We used to buy drinking water from a local shop but after a few days we could see some sediments in the water container. However, since we use the BioSand Filter we never have seen this again.”
• „The BioSand Filter is a sustainable water treatment system. It is easy to use and we never encountered problems since the installation.”
• “With other water treatment system like RO or cartridge filters,we had to change the filter media regularly. Not so with the BioSand Filter, it is a reliable water filter.”
• “We have a huge problem with iron in our well water and we never thought a filter without using chemicals would be able to filter it out but after regular usage of the BioSand Filter we know now, it is possible.”

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New roof for a hill tribe family

The Raintree Foundation is active in the Mae Chaem area, mainly in Mae Na Chorn and Mae Hae where the Raintree Foundation runs children homes. However, we have contact with many other villages and are well aware of their needs. As the rainy season draws close, we had an urgent request from a poor hill tribe family, their roof urgently needed to be replaced. Their house was damaged during the last year’s heavy rains in Northern Thailand and was rebuilt with the help of the village people. We decided to help this needy family by providing them with the roof tiles. The family was among the poorest in the village. When the house was rebuilt all the villagers helped with wood and labor to build a new great house for them. We are highly motivated that we could be a part of helping in this village initiative to improve the family living condition. The family is also joining our coffee co-op so that they will have a more sustainable income to help find a way out of the cycle of chronic poverty.

Raintree Foundation’s Language and Health Awareness workshop

In April we had a chance to provide language studies (English and Thai) and health awareness knowledge. Our aim is to provide extended assistance to community through people who are already living within the community. Many have different abilities and we will work together to outreach those who are in need especially children, where our goal is to give basic education or non-formal education as parents couldn’t provide educational support due to their little income. We had a chance to visit children in Samut Sakorn area to provide food donations before their class closed for Songkran holidays. We gave some training to new volunteers and also had a chance to talk with children to study hard for the benefit of the future as well as the importance of education. We encouraged them as well to fulfill their dreams instead of dropping out from school half way.

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RAM-Pump installation

Last week, we installed a  ram pump in a remote village in the Mae Hong Son province. The pump supplies water for the whole village which lies about 80 meters above the actual water source. Together with the locals we installed the pipes and the pump and afterwards they got a training on how to take care of the installation and how to maintain the ram pump. From now on they don’t need to walk down to the well to carry the water to their houses.

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