Rice for Thai kindergarteners in need

We count ourselves as most fortunate in having friends who believe in what we are trying to do to protect and educate poor, vulnerable children and who support us in our most difficult endeavors.

Your support comes in the form of rice: rice for our children, our students, and our poorest neighbors in the slums. Rice may not seem like the most dramatic gift. It’s not the kind of gift people boast about giving. It’s dry, unexciting. It’s just a simple food staple.

But rice fuels all our programs. And without rice, our programs would all fall apart.

We serve over 3,000 meals each day with rice as the basic staple.

The majority of these meals are for the 2,300 poor children who attend our twenty-three kindergartens spread across the slums of Bangkok. For many of these children, the lunch we serve is their only nutritious meal of the day; and that one nutritious meal keeps the students growing, alert, playful, and a joy in the classrooms and in the playgrounds. Rice fuels their lifetime love of learning.

We also prepare at least two meals each day – breakfast and dinner - to the children who live with us as family in our Mercy Centre. These children have been orphaned, abused, used, trafficked or abandoned before they joined our family. (Their lunchtime meal is served in school. Every Mercy child attends school!)

The 45 children who attend our Janusz Korczak School for street children also receive at least one meal per day. Again, this meal is the core of their daily nutritional needs.

In recent years, we have built simple one-room schools on four construction worker camps in Bangkok for the children of migrant Burmese and Cambodian workers. We operate these schools to teach children, who otherwise would never go to any school, their first lessons in reading and writing, math and more. It also gives the children a safe secure environment to learn and play while their parents work in nearby construction sites. Approximately 80 children attend these schools and receive lunch every school day.

Our social workers on the streets also give three-kilogram sacks of rice to the poorest of the poor, those who cannot provide for themselves. In addition, our HIV/AIDS teams visit patients in their shacks and provide dry foods, including sacks of rice, to allow the poor living with AIDS to live with dignity as productive members of their families and communities.

Finally, it’s important to note that our foundation is a community drop-in center located in the middle of Bangkok’s largest slum community We offer sacks of rice to everyone who comes to our Mercy Centre hungry.

To serve all our programs, in total, we need 2.5 metric tons of rice every month.

Current prices: 23 Thai baht per kilo (approximately two-thirds of one US dollar – 68 cents).

To give you an idea how your gifts make a difference, we offer the following example: a 50-kilogram sack of rice costs around $30 and can serve thousands of poor school children in our classrooms.

On behalf of everyone here in our Mercy Centre – especially our kindergarten students, our own Mercy children, their house moms and house dads, and all the people we are able to reach through your generous support – we wish to extend our most heartfelt thanks.

Please visit our Mercy Centre any time. You are always welcome. You will always be a part of our Mercy family.

Links:

• our main website