Education Thailand Project #25740

Helping Children from Ex-Sex workers in Thailand

by Tamar Center

Project Report | Mar 18, 2021
Slowly schools are returning to normal

By Daniel Vaupel | Director

Showing off the project that they made

Hello everyone!

Here comes another update about the children at Tamar Center. The whole last year has been very weird for them. The long times where the school were closed, then a time where the schools only opened for half days followed by a short normal time towards the end of the year. Sadly 2021 started with another complete shutdown for all schools for the whole month of January and right now only half the schools are running normally, and the other half are only running for half days. The only good thing for the kids is that they will not have exams at the end of this school term. They are really enjoying that! In Thailand, the school year normally finishes in March and starts in May the next school year starts. But this year the school year goes until the middle of April and starts at the beginning of May already to make up some of the lost time.

The year was also not easy for the mothers as they had a hard time with home schooling and keeping the children busy at home. I think they are even happier than the children that schools and our nursery are open again. When things opened, we were finally able to have the first Tamar Family Night of 2021 at the end of February. We all went to the beach, had a barbecue, and did many games with the children. They enjoyed the running around and we adults were happy that we could be outside and finally with a bigger group again. Pattaya right now is actually nice – there are still no Tourists around (which is very hard for the economy and for jobs but great for traffic and empty beaches!). We are trying to make as much as possible out of these weeks and just hope that there will be no further lockdowns. Thailand has finally started a vaccination program and it looks likely that maybe in October Tourist will be allowed back into the country.

You will also see some pictures attached from a former Tamar woman that now has her own job but where we still support her children. We had a meeting with her and then took her shopping for supplies for school and some gifts for her children as well. She had a lot of fun picking the items and sharing them with her children.

We are also very happy that we can report that one of our babies got very good news. When she was born the doctors detected some issues with the heart muscle. Now that the child is about a year old, they went for a check-up to a special heart clinic for children and the Doctors confirmed that the muscle has grown and is now almost 100% as it should be – which is really amazing, and we are very thankful for that.

Attached you will see some of the pictures of our children from an outing that we did with them just after Christmas to a Zoo. It was only three days before the second surprise lockdown started and we were glad that we managed to do an outing at that time.

Good, so much from us from Pattaya. The kids are now looking forward to a normal school break and hopefully they can really enjoy this holiday and play outside a lot!

Thank you for your continued support of the children of Tamar Center!

For the Tamar Family

Finally Beach again!

Three Birthday Kids

Zoo outing

Zoo - find the animal

Gifts!

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Dec 18, 2020
Merry Christmas!!!!

By Daniel Vaupel | Director

Tamar Team November

Merry Christmas and happy and blessed New Year wishes from the whole Tamar family to you! We hope that even though restrictions are in place in many places around the world, that you still will be able to have a refreshing time with your family and friends!

We just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support during this very difficult and also very different year of 2020. We are amazed by your generosity and your help. Without you, we, as an organization, would not be standing anymore. This year completely changed the whole way that we are financed. We normally receive about 60% of our funding through our own businesses where the women that come through our programs are employed after training. But due to Covid-19, our businesses are mostly still shut down. And when the mail also stopped going in March, our online store couldn’t mail and we were really in trouble.

As we were considering what to do, we saw that the needs of the women that were still in the bars were even greater than ours. Many of them had no income anymore and no savings, they were losing their housing because they were not able to pay rent, and many were hungry. The idea of “food help” was born and until now we have given out thousands after thousands of food bags filled with needs of everyday life: rice, noodles, fish, soap, hygiene articles, etc. Through this program, we were able to reach and talk to many more women than we could have imagined. Many came back when they ran out of food and collected more. Even now, we are giving out a hot meal each Friday plus food bags to women that come to our Outreach Center. We were able to run mini trainings (one month long) in baking and hair dressing. And, we had a record number, 13 women, attend our three-month long vocational and life training session where we taught them sewing, hairdressing and baking. Then, we were able to not only employ all our students, but also to employ several other women in card making because we received two very big card orders. Now, at the end of the year, our students, that we helped when they had nothing, went out and helped distribute 400 huge Tamar Christmas food and gift bags to the still needy women here in Pattaya.

Moreover, we were also able to extend our child sponsorship program and added 15 children who will now receive monthly donations through us. We continued to offer housing to women in need and took in a number of new women, three of them highly pregnant who gave birth to healthy babies during this year. The only thing that we were not able to complete was our new building project. We made some progress but were not able to raise all the needed funds in 2020, but this will be our main priority now for 2021.

Looking back, I am not sure how we did it all. Our team is smaller – as all our volunteers had to leave Thailand due to visa issues. But we have seen our Thai women, who have gone through our program, rise up, learn, and take leadership. We are very proud of them. And somehow, which in great part is due to your sacrificial giving, we are still able to finish this year in the black – even though we had hardly any income from our businesses and gave out sooo much aid! Thank you for standing with us, for trusting us, and helping us make a difference here in Pattaya. You have touched the lives of many women and have given hope in these desperate circumstances.

From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU and please have a wonderful Christmas!

For the Tamar Family

PS: The pictures are from our different Christmas activities and Outreaches of the last weeks – please enjoy!

Thankful women in the Bar

Sponsorship children with Christmas Gifts

Packing the Bags

One of our Christmas Outreach Parties

Food Distribution

Women getting bags

Christmas Bags going out

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Nov 13, 2020
New children added to our sponsorship program

By Daniel Vaupel | Director

Some children receiving some toys and food

Hello everyone!

Time for a short update from us in Pattaya. In October we were able to add another 13 children to our Tamar Children Sponsorship program. These are the children of the women that have finished the Tamar vocational and life training and are now employed with us. They actually have more children than that, but the other children are cared for by the father’s family and have no need for sponsorship. From the 13 new children three have moved into our housing and two more will come in the month of November, the others are staying with relatives. It is nice to see our family grow. The mothers are very thankful for the support that they are getting and asked us to express their thanks to you as well.

In November, our children are looking forward to some school free time. In Thailand schools started to open again at the end of summer but with reduced or alternate days for the kids to attend. Some schools even did only half days for the kids – some in the morning and some in the afternoon. As you can imagine this was very difficult for us to organize and it was stressful for the children as well. But now they are all fulltime back in school and the government has decided to give them all two-week break at the end of November. We are using this time to also give all the women at Tamar a couple of days off and so they can spend some time together with their children or with their families.

In the last months we also had a number of trips to Issan, the eastern region of Thailand, were we go to the visit the villages of the women in our program to help them rebuilt relationships with their families. During these visits we often to some children programs, offer free haircuts to the villagers and much more. You can see some pictures below; they always have a good time.

Thank you for your support for the children of our women. It makes a huge difference in their lives and it is nice to see them develop and being cared for.

For the Tamar Family

Feeding Giraffes during Zoo Outing October

the babies

Birthday celebration

Playing with mothers phones

Food time!

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