Helping Children from Ex-Sex workers in Thailand

Greetings from Tamar Center!

How are you all doing? I hope that in your part of the world things are starting to look up and that restrictions are getting lifted. Sadly, here in Thailand this is not the case yet – and especially our children are the once that have to suffer the most. They do not like to be at home for most of the days and miss their friends from school.

From the middle of April until the end of May we had very strict shutdown rules and had to work from home with all schools closed. Officially the new school year should have started in mid-May but that was postponed to the 14^th of June. When the 14^th of June came around, all the schools in Pattaya and all Provinces in Thailand with big number of Covid-19 cases were told that they were not allowed to open and currently it does not look likely that anything will change before of the end of July. The schools were ordered to create work sheets for the children to fill out at home, some online lessons, online teaching videos for the children to watch, etc.

Our women have children in eight different schools and guess what, all these schools have a different program that they follow. After just a couple of days it became clear that for our mothers it was impossible to work and then help their children with the schoolwork’s. Some also did not internet on their phones, needed their phones and could not leave them with their children etc.

As a Tamar Leadership Team, we decided that in order to halfway function we had to step in and help. We now have the children come to work with their mothers in the morning and we have set one room aside, where the school aged children spent the day working on their school assignments. We also have assigned one Staff Member to look after the children, help them with logging in when there is an online class, explain to them their work sheets and to start and finish the day with some games and group activities – a little bit like normal school. This setup is far from ideal, but the kids seem to enjoy it and the mothers can actually come to work. We still hope that schools can open soon!

Due to the new school year starting the mothers also had to spend a lot of money for new school uniforms and the needed books for their children. Thanks to your donations we are saving for each child that is at Tamar every month money for these expenses. The Mothers this year are especially happy that we have the money ready for them, as due to Covid, they and the families in the countryside are very short on money. In the last days they all came, checked how much money they had saved, went shopping and brought us the bills. All of them had enough money saved to cover all the costs for their children. Thank you for providing the funds for our children fund!!!

During the time that we were in shutdown and had to stay home, we did a lot of renovation work in our houses, and you can see a nice pic here as well from the kids wanting to help!

Thank you for your continued support for the children here in Pattaya!

For the Tamar Family