Rice for Thai kindergarteners in need

A poor grandmother, Mrs. Lek - with four grandchildren under her care and no means of support - walks two miles to visit our Mercy Centre every day. We prepare a lunch and dinner for her family, placed in re-usable tins that she exchanges on every visit.

Grandmother Lek’s plight is not unusual in our neighbourhood, the “70 Rai” community in the heart of Bangkok’s largest slum. And Grandmother Lek is hardly alone in seeking our support. Every mom dad, grandparent, aunt, uncle and child in the community knows they can visit our Mercy Centre in times of need. They know that we will keep keep destitute families and individuals on their feet, feed them, and support the education of their children. In return, our brothers and sisters in the slums love and educate their children, and take pride in their community.

Your donations support these families and thousands more like them through our Child Protection, Education, and HIV/AIDS programs. By far the largest group we reach are kindergarten children. We operate 23 kindergartens throughout the poorest communities in Bangkok with a total enrolment exceeding 2,500 3- to 6-year-old children. We also operate a kindergarten for a destitute community of ethnic Mokan (informally known as sea gypsies) in Ranong Province and feed and educate all the children in their village (60 children).  Plus five schools in Bangkok in construction worker camps for the children whose parents (mostly Cambodian) build the skyscrapers around the city (200 children). Plus a school for street children, the Janusz Korczak School of SE Asia, in our Mercy Centre (40 children). 

Almost 20% of the school children who enrol in our schools come to us malnourished. 

We weigh the children and measure their height regularly, keep records of their development; and provide additional snacks and meals to to the children who are most in need of extra nourishment.

Your donations of rice also help feed the 180 children who live with us as family in our Mercy Centre homes and shelters, the 200 street children we support and protect daily, hundreds of the poorest of the poor living with AIDS, and entire communities after fires or mass evictions.

We prepare almost one million meals every year and require 2.5 metric tonnes of rice every month. 

A $5 donation feeds dozens of children. A gift of $30 (equivalent to a 50-kilogram sack of rice) reaches hundreds upon hundreds of poor children and families.

Thank you so much for your past support. Please visit our Mercy Centre in Bangkok. You are always most welcome and will always be a part of our family.

Links:

• The Human Development Foundation-Mercy Centre

Dear Friends,

On behalf of all our children, students, and teachers, we wish to thank you for your generous gift of rice for poor school children.

Rice is what fuels all our programs. Without rice, we could not fulfil our mission to educate and protect the poorest and most vulnerable children living in the slums and on the streets of Bangkok.

With rice as our staple, we serve over 3,000 meals every school day and over 1,000 meals on Saturdays, Sundays and school holidays. We serve these meals as noted below:

1. Lunch to the 2,500 school children who attend our 23 kindergartens spread across Bangkok’s poor communities.

2. Lunch to the 200 children who live in construction worker camps, where we have set up schools to teach and protect these children.

3. Lunch for the 40 children who attend our informal school for street children.

4. Breakfast and dinner for our own children. Plus lunch on weekends and holidays. Over 160 orphaned, abused, and abandoned children live in our Mercy Centre as family.

5. Dinner for the street children we protect daily. Almost 200 street children depend on our social workers to receive very basic care on the streets.

6. We also provide 5-kilogram sacks of rice to the elderly poor, the indigent, and to victims of fires of evictions.

In this report, we wish to focus on the largest of these groups above - the students who attend our kindergartens in the slums.

Almost 20% of our incoming students come to us malnourished. 

The children come from diverse but quite poor backgrounds.  Many of their parents collect recyclable trash to survive. These parents may collect enough trash to earn an adequate meal for their families on one day but then make nothing for the next two or three days. On good days, their children dine on instant noodles; on bad days, next to nothing.  Many more of our schoolchildren are under the guardianship of grandparents who have no income at all. Most children live with parents who work as day laborers, food vendors, or maids, earning far less than the current minimum daily wage (currently around $9/day).

Therefore, while we teach our school children how to read and write and count and play and brush their teeth and say nice words,  we also must ensure that these children are receiving a nourishing lunch and extra protein snacks every school day.

We weigh the children and measure their height regularly (see photos attached); keep records of their development; and provide additional snacks and meals to the children most in need of extra nourishment.

Since we opened our first kindergarten in 1973, over 50,000 poor children have learned to read and write in our classrooms. Many of our kindergarten graduates have continued their studies past primary and secondary schooling and earned degrees at vocational colleges and universities.  Many of our current kindergarten teachers learned to read and write in the very kindergartens where they teach today.

Rice keeps all our kindergartens running and all our students learning.

We need 2.5 metric tons of rice each month to feed all the children and adults we serve.

A 50-kilogram sack of rice, which costs approximately US$30, can help us nourish hundreds of children, students, and destitute families and individuals. 

Thank you so much for your past support. Please visit our Mercy Centre in Bangkok. You are always most welcome and will always be a part of our family: www.mercycentre.org

Links:

• our website
• facebook page