A Royal Project 2015
March 2015: The round of visits has reached its
end. With some, we noted an improvement: the children’s grades are better. In
others, the families seem immobile, even discouraged.
The temperature rises day by day and becomes
overwhelming, approaching 40°C in the rice fields, which we visit by motorbike. There is just one family left to visit in Ban Khongsaikao.
We don’t know this family yet, we only know
that it is a single-parent household: a father and his two children. His wife
left them a few months ago.
When we get there, the place is composed a
group of dilapidated shacks where years ago rice dealers stored their rice. We walk towards this assemblage of wooden
planks and sheet metal. A thin, ageless,
man is crouched down holding a small fish impaled on a stick of bamboo
over a fire. It will be his dinner. A little further on is a couple of Burmese
refugees (with 2 children), faces covered with Thanaka cream (a yellowish white
plant-based paste widely used in Burma to cover the face and sometimes women’s
and girls’ arms, and sometimes those of men and boys too). The woman limps as
she walks, causing her to sway. The two children look at us in surprise. Montri
asks where the family of Preecha Onn-Sri is, we have no actual address. It
turns out that they live in one of the three huts a little further on. As we
approach the hut, a relatively young man comes out. This is the father of
8-year-old Sookjai, who is in the second year of school, and 5-year-old
Chaiyapon, in the second year of kindergarten, both at the school in Ban Sataey,
2 kms away. We provided emergency sponsorship for them 5 months ago. We have
come to see how things are going.
The father, aged about 39, only has occasional
work. His looks very tired, but we note that he shows signs of alcoholism. We
are shocked to meet this family in such a sorry physical and moral condition.
They have nothing to eat; so we go and order 30 kilos of rice. We give him half
right away and they’ll get the rest later. We’re afraid he’ll sell it to buy
alcohol.
The next day, we go back to the school to
report on our visits and say goodbye before leaving. We tell Kou Modt about our
visit to the family of Preecha Onn-Sri the day before and that we are worried
for the little girl. The boy is too young (and mentally slow) to be aware of
their desperate situation. We cannot do anything for this year and it makes us
very sad. We plan to discuss it with our board in order to take action as soon
as we return to France.
Kou Modt promises to keep an eye out for this
family and that reassures us somewhat. On her side, she is moving. She informs
the authorities of the family’s precarious situation. By chance, this year King
Rama IX will celebrate his 89th birthday on 5 December 2015 and the
national education system wants to mark it with an act of kindness towards the
king by helping to build the same number of houses for the poor as his age.
With our agreement, a proposal is developed and
accepted by the authorities. In the kingdom we were lucky enough to have our
project selected from among the 89 proposals. We obtain the sum of 80,000 bahts.
The rest of the cost will be up to us.
We already have the land, which is serviced.
The house on stilts will be built next to the two others the association built
3 years ago, on the road heading from Ban Sataey to Makhamtao.
Kou Modt provides us with a formal request for
funding, always in keeping with the association’s insistence on transparency.
She also gives us the estimate for a total of 250,000 bahts. Her husband offers
us recycled wood worth 20,000 bahts. That means 150,000 bahts remain for us to
pay. The house will be built in the same style as the two others, but a little
taller and bigger.
Thanks to a new initiative of Kou Modt
vis-à-vis the authorities, France (LAVT) agrees to the project and she rapidly
receives the promised amount. They have to work fast because the house must be
completed on the King’s birthday, 5 December 2015, and it was already the
beginning of September.
We took advantage of the presence of the
workmen to raise the other two houses because it was impossible to walk upright
between the stilts.
On December 5th, the house stood
proud for its inauguration.
The Les Amis du Vieux Tamarin association is
proud to have offered a family shelter once again, under decent
conditions of comfort. The funds for the
construction of this house came in part from the profits catered meals and in
part from the sale of craft products.
This is the 6th house built by Les
Amis du Vieux Tamarin for “the protection of children”.
Guy and Montri