What a load of rubbish!

When I first moved here, there used to be very regular refuse collections. Each street has several large yellow communal wheelie bins, and a lorry used to come around at all random hours of the day and night to empty them. (Do not imagine a modern, mechanised refuse-collection vehicle. This is a large open truck with rubbish piled precariously high and the men who collect the rubbish perched even more precariously on top of the pile. No gloves, masks or any sort of protection against the filth and stench. This is the sort of job that goes to the migrant workers here...)
As well as the official collections, enterprising individuals on bicycles with huge panniers/sacks attached at either side would come and dig through the bins for anything that could be usefully recycled.
Some months ago, the regular collections inexplicably ceased; instead of the bins being emptied more than once a day, we were lucky if the lorry appeared a couple of times in the month. The result: the bins rapidly overflowed, and then people simply threw their bags of rubbish on the floor in the vague vicinity of the bins. On the rare occasions that the lorry came around, the bins would be emptied, but the rubbish on the floor was simply left there - rich pickings for the street dogs.
Someone on our street had the bright idea of removing the bins from where they were (right in front of people's houses) to a patch of wasteland at the end of the road where there are no houses, so at least the growing pile of rubbish was not in front of anyone's front gate. However, old habits die hard, and I found that for weeks after the bins had been removed people were still randomly throwing bags of rubbish outside my front wall where, for a short time, a bin had stood! After getting sick of having to clear it up and haul it off down the road to the new bin location, I finally put up some notices in Burmese, Thai and English requesting people not to throw their rubbish there.

 

It took a few weeks, but eventually the majority of the dumping stopped. (All I need now is another notice for the dogs, kindly requesting them not to leave their generous donations outside my front gate!)

Sadly, after months of irregular collections, the new location of the bins has come to resemble a rubbish tip, as none of the excess rubbish has been cleared.

In the rainy season, this patch of land becomes completely waterlogged and turns into a lake. I hate to think what it will be like then, with all the plastic bags floating around and the contents slowly beginning to rot...
One more thing I will not miss when I leave, together with the dogs, the cockerel, the erratic water supply and the crazy drivers!

End of year party

Today was our last visit to any of the centres for this school year. Things have really wound down now, and the children spent much of the morning playing (which is what we've been trying to encourage from the start!)
This week they have been learning about the Songkran water festival, which will take place during the April break. Today they learned about the tradition of pouring water (in small amounts!) over people as a sign of respect. (A far cry from the drunken drenching of innocent passers-by with bucket-loads of water and ice cubes that characterizes the Songkran festivities on the streets of Mae Sot!) The children took turns to pour perfumed water over the hands of the teachers (myself included.)

Afterwards, they went outside to play with the water and had fun soaking each other. They had clearly all been asked to bring a change of clothes for the occasion, and soon the fence was festooned with all their little outfits and underwear drying in the sun.

We finished the morning singing all our favourite songs with the ukulele, and I began to feel rather emotional as I realised this would be the last time I would see most of them, as all but the youngest will be moving on to school in May. It took time to build their trust, especially as we would only show up at their centres for one week each month, but now after nine months of working with them they welcome us with open arms and smiling faces, eager for us to join in their games.

We have resigned ourselves to not doing very much at the centres in the month of May, as the teachers will be settling in the new children, with all the attendant tears, tantrums and toilet accidents! There could be a key role for my coordinator, though, in helping out the teachers with some useful phrases in Burmese, such as "Mummy will be coming for you soon!" At the centre that we visited this week, almost all the children enrolled for next year are migrant children, so there will be plenty of scope for support with language and communication issues.

Next week we are off to Bangkok for an annual Programme Area Review meeting for the VSO education programme. We will also spend a couple of days at a big book fair in Bangkok, to get some more resources for the centres. Later in April, Alice and I are going to spend a couple of weeks in Burma, ending up at the wedding of her coordinator. We have timed the trip to avoid Songkran in Mae Sot, but we will probably be out of the frying pan and into the fire (or out of the puddle and into the pool), as the festival is celebrated with just as much enthusiasm in Burma. Look out for some soggy photos!

A little goes a long, long way

People who know me well will not be at all surprised to learn that, on top of the day-to-day duties of my volunteer placement (which constitutes a full time job in itself) I have taken on several additional voluntary responsibilities. (I never was very good at deciding when I already had enough on my plate!)

Early on in my placement I joined the committee of the 1% Fund Thailand, which was established almost 30 years ago by VSO staff and volunteers in Thailand. More on that in a moment…
In January, I joined the board of governors of a local organisation here in Mae Sot that supports some of the migrant learning centres, and most recently I have signed up to be one of VSO’s “Development Advocates” – volunteers who contribute to raising awareness and changing perceptions of issues relating to international development by sharing stories and information from their placement country.

This post is dedicated to the tremendous success of the 1% Fund over the years in supporting some of the most marginalised and vulnerable communities in Thailand and Burma.

How did it start?

Way back in the 1960s, the United Nations recommended that developed countries give 1% of their GNP for international development funding. Very few nations stepped up to commit this amount of money to help developing countries. (Quiz Question – what percentage do you think the UK gives today? Answer at the end of the post)

In 1976, a small group of UN staff in Geneva decided to lead by example and created their own fund for development by setting aside 1% of their salaries.
In 1985 a group of VSO volunteers in Thailand picked up on the idea and started donating 1% of their monthly allowance towards a fund to support small-scale grassroots projects. These projects aim to improve the lives of families and communities in Thailand and Burma.

A secondary aim of the fund was to demonstrate what can be accomplished with a donation of 1% of income, and thereby encourage people the world over to start similar funding schemes. The 1% Fund has always been run by current volunteers, so the administrative costs are almost zero. This means almost all the money goes directly to the people whom the fund is designed to support. More recently, with the number of VSO volunteers in Thailand decreasing, we have received support from the United Nations 1% for Development Fund in Geneva.

Who does the Fund support?

In selecting applications for funding, the committee looks in particular for projects which benefit communities sustainably over the long term, that will have a positive impact for women in the community, and that will limit harm to the environment. The idea is to provide support to small-scale community projects that would be unlikely to obtain funding from larger donors or other sources. The 1% Fund provides small grants of up to 20,000 Baht – equivalent to around £400.

Over the years, the range of projects that have been funded is impressive. Here is a small selection:

• Local environmental improvements including clean water supplies
• Small-scale community farming projects
• Teacher training in Burma
• Income generation projects, focusing on empowerment for local women and girls
• Supporting education for children in the refugee camps
• Capacity building projects for emerging civil society organisations
• Youth training projects
• Fundraising initiatives for AIDS orphans
• Adult literacy classes in the refugee camps
• Agricultural conservation projects

You can read more detail about some of these projects on the 1% Fund Thailand website.

With VSO now planning to close its remaining programmes in Thailand and move into Burma instead, we are coming to the end of an era with the 1% Fund Thailand. We are in the process of administering the final project grants and wrapping up the fund. I feel tremendously privileged to have had the opportunity to be involved in this initiative. I have been impressed by the dedication and resourcefulness of the individuals and groups involved when it comes to improving the lives and futures of people in their communities. So many of the projects depend upon local people giving freely of their time and energy, working together to get the job done. The will and commitment to self-improvement is there, and often a very small amount of money can turn a community’s vision for a brighter future into reality.

Quiz Question: you will find the answer in this short video. 

50 Shades - The Trilogy

Ranong visit

The blog has been sadly neglected for a while, so here is a whistle-stop tour of what I have been up to:

Saturday 22 Feb: Travelled to Bangkok on the day bus.

Sunday 23 Feb: Routine medical and dental appointments. I can now hear again after having had my ears cleaned out!

Monday 24 Feb: VSO meeting for ECD volunteers to discuss project progress and plans for the remaining 10 months. We are a rapidly dwindling band. One of the volunteers that I started with had only signed up for a year, so she has just left, and the other one left her placement early some months ago. There are now just four of us - Alice and me in Mae Sot and Jennel and Wim in Ranong. Wim's placement finishes at the end of this month, but he is planning to stay on and continue to work alongside Jennel until the end of the project. The VSO governance programme is finishing at the end of March, which means only the ECD project is still active. So, officially there will just be three of us - the last remaining VSO volunteers in Thailand!!
After the meeting, we all took the night bus from Bangkok to Ranong to spend the rest of the week visiting the project there. We were accompanied by Alice's coordinator and her recently appointed teacher support assistant, who she is training up to be able to continue similar support work in migrant learning centres when the project finishes.

 

Tuesday 25 Feb: Arrived in Ranong around 6am and got a couple of hours' sleep before setting off at nine to visit two of the migrant learning centres that Jennel and Wim work with.

MMR Learning Centre (Marist Mission Ranong - not Measles, Mumps, Rubella!)
This centre is well-funded and resourced and supports community health and education initiatives as well as the core school activities. They have a new building, constructed one year ago.

Wattana Learning Centre - this centre is more typical of the learning environment for many migrant children. The entire school is housed in a single-roomed building, with partial partitions to separate one class from another. As the usual teaching and learning style consists of chanted repetition, the noise level quickly becomes cacophonous. One wonders how students are able to focus on what is happening in their class and cut out everything else. And any child with hearing difficulties would be completely lost!

After lunch, we were allowed the afternoon off to recuperate from the journey! Later, Jennel took us to visit the Ranong hot springs.

We decided we could sell this photo to skincare product companies, to advertise either tanning or whitening lotion, depending which direction you read it!

I should hasten to add that the water we had our feet in was NOT at 65 degrees!! It was still pretty hot, though.

 

The hot water beneath the ground heats the floor here. People come to lie down and ease their aching joints and muscles. Personally, I found it slightly too hot!

 

We also visited this golden Buddha nearby

 

Wednesday 26 Feb: Bangnon Learning Centre – caters for children from 4 years up to 14/15. There are only four teachers, so many of the students are taught in mixed-grade classes. We observed Jennel team teaching with the KG1 teacher – first a practical maths lesson using physical activity to reinforce counting skills and later an art lesson.

 

 

 

Thursday 27 Feb: Bangklan Learning Centre – caters for around 80 students from KG to Grade 4. The building is within the compound of a Thai school, though it seems the two schools remain very separate, with little interaction or collaboration between them. Some migrant children do attend the Thai school, and it is hoped that all the children will eventually be able to transfer.

 

 

 

The future of many migrant learning centres in the border areas between Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) is very uncertain. Many of the donors and agencies that work with the migrant communities (including VSO) are shifting their attention to Burma now that the country is opening up more, with the result that funding for migrant issues in the border region is decreasing. However, it is unlikely that there will be a large scale return of the migrant population to Burma while the situation there for the various ethnic groups remains uncertain. In Mae Sot, there is an emergency situation at the moment, with many migrant learning centres threatened with imminent closure.

 

Friday 28 Feb: We had a day off and hired the songthaew driver who had been ferrying us around to the learning centres to take us to the beach, about an hour's drive away.

 

 Our trusty driver

 

It was far too hot to sit on the beach itself, as there was no shade, which explains why it was utterly deserted! We sat and relaxed in the shade of a wooded park area at the top of the beach.

 

Lunch!

 

Saturday 1 March: Alice and I had decided to splash out and pay the extra to fly back, rather than face the 24 hour journey by bus (day bus to Bangkok, followed by night bus to Mae Sot.) Instead, we were back by lunchtime, after two 1-hour flights and a couple of hours waiting at Bangkok. I was very relieved to discover that the water supply problems that I had been experiencing in the week before I left seem to have been resolved, at least for the moment.

 

This week it is back to business as normal at the centres, except it is anything but normal, as end of year events keep popping up unexpectedly and putting a spanner in the works of our plans! We have discovered that the centres will be closed for most of next week, as the teachers are required to attend a provincial level sports event in Tak, the provincial capital. This is a sports event for teachers, not children. First time I've heard of anything like that!!