Warm Heart at Work

Greetings from the Clinic in the Clouds!

I know blogs are supposed to be spontaneous, near stream of consciousness, daily diaries, but we’ve been on top of a mountain for the past week and the mountain featured neither internet cafes nor wired connectivity. Sorry about that!

Silence should not be construed evidence of Christmas break sloth. The Warm Heart team has been hard at work, and I do mean hard at work, since December 22nd. In a week we built a “clinic in the clouds” that swirl around the small Akha village of Ban Arya (population 207 without us).

You can see lots of photos of the project - what Ban Arya looks like, kids, people, construction, the Warm Heart staff at work and at rest - if you go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/WarmHeartWorldwide.

Actually, it wasn’t just us. On any given day ten Akha women with their dangling beads and high silver headdresses (wrapped in colorful dish towels whether as a fashion statement or protection from the sun, I have no idea) hoed up a storm, five men cemented the foundation or a dozen kids just buzzed around.

The project really started on the 19th when a couple dozen of our friends from a Chiang Mai 4-wheel off-road club showed up to help carry our supplies up to Ban Arya. These guys have to be seen to be believed. In Texas or Oklahoma, you wouldn’t bat an eye – big, diesel Ford 250s and Toyotas with huge tires, jacked suspensions, chrome roll-bars, macho grills and winches, and, yes, snorkels. All that’s missing is the gun racks. In Thailand, however, these dudes are totally over the top and we love them. They’re all in construction and didn’t think anything to throwing twenty-five bags of cement, twenty-five bags of sand, lumber, tools, food for a small army and beer for a bigger one into the back and heading off up the mountain. The tougher the better. Good thing, too, because it was 9:00 PM, bitter cold, and pitch dark by the time they had off-loaded!

On the 22nd half the Warm Heart team bounced up the dirt path that passes as a road, dumped tools and supplies at the site and then settled in at the Queen’s cabins. The entire top of one mountain in the range is a Royal Project devoted to organic farming and the preservation of endangered flora. At the highest point are a fantastic lookout and a clutch of A-frame bungalows. The area is exquisitely landscaped with local flowers, shrubs and trees, and the views are breathtaking. We made a big fire, grilled strips of beef and sang a lot (something that Warm Heart does whenever there’s food and fun). Looking up through the tall pines, every star was in focus and the moon was brilliant. The air was clear and cold. It was perfect – and it stayed perfect for a week!

On the 23rd almost a third of the village met us at the to-be clinic – the women in full Akha dress (which they wear all day every day) and the men in a motley of shorts, tee shirts, army uniform parts, blue jeans and traditional Akha pants. Everyone fell upon the sorry old structure that was to become the clinic and in a matter of hours stripped the frame clean. Gone were the old vertical bamboo slat walls, the sagging paneling, the piles of junk, the filth in the privy. A dozen hoes attacked the rock hard red clay around the slab to carve out drainage ditches and repair erosion runnels. By noon “Grandpa” (as the merciless Warm Heart staff dubbed our 55 year old carpenter) was hard at work framing up new walls and by evening the first of the new clapboard was going on.

This stage of the Clinic in the Clouds project – preparing the clinic building itself – involved a gut job renovation of an existing structure. By the time the gutting was finished, all that was left was slab, knee wall, ten tree log posts, a roof, and a separate out house. In five days, the combined Warm Heart and Ban Arya teams squared the posts, put in wall studs, clapboarded the entire building and added the interior dividing wall, put in four big double windows and three solid core door, added solar power and wired the building for three compact florescent ceiling lights, a hanging work light where the examination bed will be and wall plugs, plumbed the out house and the examination room adding a sink and wall faucet, built a new, bamboo fence and dug drainage ditches around the building, laid concrete aprons around the building to prevent future erosion under the slab, skim coated the cinder block knee wall with concrete inside and out, stained all of the wood with anti-termite stain, and painted the knee wall around the building inside and out. It was a huge amount of fun.

The renovation project was funded by Hannah Reynolds (who also came to Thailand to help with construction) and contributions from her friends at Bryn Athyn College. (http://www.brynathyn.edu) The GlobalMed Chapter of Northeastern University is also a prospective donor. (globemed.nu@gmail.com )

Even renovated, the clinic is a simple building that will serve many purposes. It sits on a concrete slab some 20 ft by 35 ft and stands 15 ft to a single peak. The roof is supported by 10” square posts. A cinder block knee wall runs around the outside above which rise walls of 2×3 stud covered by clapboard. The interior is split into a large room and a small room. The large room will serve as a classroom for the health volunteers and for Impact, an NGO run by a son of the village and his wife. They will use the space to teach villagers to read Romanized Akha and preserve traditional culture. The small room will be the clinic itself with an examining table, metal medicine cabinet, stainless steel instruments table, sink, and so on. Lighting is supplied by translucent roof tiles and florescent bulbs powered by a solar panel, inverter and deep-cycle battery set.

Our hosts are a collection of remarkable people. Leading the work team is our Warm Heart daughter Nung Sudah’s father, P’AhUe. He is short, stocky, deeply tanned and weathered with broad, calloused hands. Looking into his strong, craggy face, there is no question that Sudah is his daughter; the resemblance is uncanny. Leading the project – and it seems the village, too – is NaaLay, the senior health volunteer. NaaLay is tireless. She can out hoe, out lift and out carry any person in the village, to say nothing of Warm Heart. She is everywhere giving directions or giving a hand; everyone listens to her. It’s hard not to. NaaLay has a smile that gives off light, but eyes that never leave yours during a conversation. At thirty-four she may still be working for her sixth grade certificate through Thailand’s informal education program, but this is a woman to be reckoned with.

We have made lots of valuable contacts up on the mountain. We have become very friendly with the director of the Royal Project, who is delighted that Warm Heart is providing the first ever medical facility for the people in this area. He has promised to include us in his dispatches to the palace. We have also had the opportunity to talk at length with the director of the Phrao Hospital who was touring a water project with his staff and stopped to spend the night at the bungalows. He is excited about the prospect of hosting a first class emergency medicine training program at his hospital and about the possibility of partnering with an American hospital.

Ban Arya is a pretty normal mountain village in most ways. What sets it apart is the nearby Royal Project which provides year around employment at 100 baht (about $3) a day. Very few mountain villages have a local source of cash income and must depend on remittances from village members working in distant cities. In other ways, however, Ban Arya is typical. Houses are built up the sides of two connecting, steep sided small valleys so that most look out over the one below. Two packed clay tracks run through town and a web of foot paths connect the homes. There are three churches, but no school, no store, no clinic (yet), no extension service, no post office or other official building, nothing but bamboo homes. There is an herbal doctor, a basket weaver, a musician. Every woman in the village is a master cross-stitcher and every man can build a house without using nails.

Like all mountain villages, Ban Arya is a village of kids. They are everywhere. Ban Arya is a village that sends all of its school age children to the valley at age six so that they can attend school – and still it is crawling with kids. The minute we roll in in the morning, there they are, big eyed, serious, shy. It takes a bit for them to approach, but the hair on my arms is totally irresistible and once they’ve dared touch that, there’s no stopping them. And no matter how many of them infest the work site, there are always more elsewhere in the village. Raise your eyes from work and you see them climbing up the posts of porches or running down steep paths, swinging in the big Akha swing or chasing dogs down the road. You can hear them, too, yelling, laughing, talking, but interestingly never crying and never being yelled at by adults. Kids manage their own lives here. The bigs take care of the littles, and fighting, crying and running to momma are just not part of the repertoire.

Speaking of kids, one Warm Heart project wouldn’t be complete without spawning at least one and preferably two more projects, and by this measure Clinic in the Clouds is now complete. We have been talking among ourselves for several months about what to do to help a ten year old autistic boy in Ban Arya. On the 21st his mother died leaving his father to cope with him and several other children. Almost the first thing I was asked when we arrived in the village on the 22nd was could Warm Heart find a Warm Heart for him as we had found Warm Heart for Sudah. If only it were so easy.

This little boy is just the tip of the iceberg; every village I know in Phrao has an autistic person in it. Helping this little guy has to be part of finding a sustainable solution to the much bigger problem of how to deal with the large number of children with developmental disabilities who are a huge burden on extremely poor families with no place to turn. The government provides a subsidy of 500 baht per child, but this is nothing and does nothing to improve the quality of life of the child either.

What to do? Stay tuned; there will be a lot on this subject in the next few months. Honest, we don’t go looking for problems; they find us. But when something needs doing, it needs doing.

On a more amusing note, the second project that the clinic has spawned is all about bacon. Really. You may take bacon for granted, but here in Thailand bacon as scarce as teats on a bull, to change species. All of those many, many falang (as we’re called) who want bacon with their eggs in the morning have to buy it imported at the most astronomical prices. So? you are asking.

Well, here in Ban Arya the market for fresh pork is just too far away and there’s no money in selling pigs to each other. Solution? Don’t sell fresh pork; sell a higher value-added product such as bacon or smoked ham. They’ve got lot’s to feed pigs and lots of different, interesting woods for smoking; smokers can be made out of simple, local materials; smoked meat is much lighter that fresh and so costs less to transport; and no question their product will fetch a much better price!

Question: Do you know a meat smoking aficionado? One who would like to volunteer to spend a couple of months here in heaven teaching the first Thais in history the ancient art of smoking?

Christmas. Yes, we spent Christmas in heaven. That in itself was pretty special, but it gets better. Ban Arya speaks of itself as three villages. This puzzled us no end until we finally figured out that what they mean is that the village of Ban Arya is divided (in an amicable fashion) into three confessional villages, Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical. So what about Christmas? On the 25th everyone goes to their own church for a quiet service. Then on the 27th the whole village assembles for a day long Christmas celebration that includes no small Buddhist and animist representation, too. It is a do!

But before enjoying the grand Christmas festivities cum thank you and farewell party, we still had to finish the clinic. We got an early start, which proved to be a mistake. The hitherto trusty diesel generator wouldn’t start. All the Warm Heart and village tough guys took turns trying to crank it over, but no go. Too cold. So we resorted to pouring tea pots of boiling water over it until after almost 45 minutes, lo, with a chuff and a puff or two of black and then white smoke, it roared to life. Action.

In a couple of hours the final two walls went up, the foundation got painted, the final wiring went in, the floor got washed and after five frantic days, the first ever Clinic in the Clouds was done!

OK, so it isn’t done. The building is ready to be a clinic and all of the equipment and medical supplies are promised. What remains, however, is the main course – the training, without which the building is just a building and the equipment is just stuff.

Luckily for Warm Heart and Phrao, my little sister Dr. Tenagne Haile Mariam, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Ronald Regan School of Medicine at George Washington University, will be here in a couple of months. Tenagne will work with the local hospital to develop a training program appropriate for the requirements of the Hill Tribe villages – and for health volunteers with limited literacy and Thai language skills. Once perfected, the training will provided to health volunteers, ambulance drivers, and public health clinic staff throughout the district.

Stay tuned. This should be quite a story. Thailand has no residency program in emergency medicine and currently graduates 60 EMTs annually. In a country that suffers 530,000 serious automobile and motorbike accidents per year, we have big hopes for Tenagne’s training program!

And now for that Christmas party. The moment we arrived on the final morning the backs of both pickups were converted into impromptu kitchens. An entire 50 kg rice bag full of cabbages had to be chopped, huge bundles of cilantro minced, dozens of blocks of pig blood cubed, big bunches of morning glory picked over and cut up. Two ten gallon pots of broth were put to boil on big charcoal burners. Over at the village “community center” (a covered sitting area where everyone hangs out), chickens were being plucked and pigs butchered.

Finally it was time to put it all together. A parade of women let by our own P’SiPan arrived at the work site bearing big metal bowls of meat – chickens to be cut up and all the parts of a pig. More chopping. Everything was assembled in two ten gallon pots set to boil on smoky charcoal burners (where they were stirred like MacBeth’s witches kettle with yard long ladles). While the pots bubbled, the chopping and mincing continued as bowls and bowls of condiments were prepared – chopped Chinese cabbage, bean sprouts, pickled cabbage, parsley, garlic, chilies, and I am honestly not sure what else.

At the stroke of noon – lunch is the only thing to which “Thai time” does not apply – the word went out by crier (yes, by crier). From every direction kids, mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers descended upon us. People lined up by the tailgate of P’Pleu’s big pickup. They got a bowl, spoon and fork, and served themselves noodles from our 60 kilogram store – that is more than 120 pounds! With heaping bowls they shuffled past P’Oy, Mae Joom and P’Pleu’s wife who ladled out pint servings of the hot, steaming broth and meat. As soon as they had a spare hand, people returned to the old Warm Heart truck for a drink – Coke, “orange water”, “green water”, “red water”, or beer.

People trooped off to find comfortable places to eat anywhere they could. The kids climbed the hill and perched on rocks. Lots of the guys just stood around and shoveled it in. The women sat in big circles; others clustered with little ones and traded bites with their kids. Our girls set up their own mat for “girls’ lunch” in peace.

We ran out of food. I kid you not. Twenty gallons of soup. Sixty kg of noodles. Cases of soda. All gone. Everything. “Sorry, Ms., there’s no more.”

No one seemed to mind. Everyone just sat around and talked and talked and talked – and repeated shook the hand of any and every Warm Heart staff member encountered.

I didn’t see an end to this and the sun was getting a bit low in the sky – it is, after all, an almost four hour drive back down off the mountain – when the village headman showed up in ceremonial garb. He was truly impressive in a truly wonderful way. Over his regular black trousers and yellow golf shirt he had donned an Akha man’s smoke – imagine a long vest – made of black cotton and cross-stitched with fantastic designs, symbols and figures. On his head, he wore a brown boater with a bright pink chiffon scarf tied around it with a big bow. Wow!

We all gathered around the headman and the local Army boss – the true commander of the mountain – for farewell ceremonies. First, the presents. I got a beautiful Akha bag that Evelind is not going to get off me. Then presents for the kids – kanom (snacks). From the true toddlers to the six year olds they lined up and Evelind and I were firmly requested to do the duties. It was huge fun since none of the kids had any hope of hanging onto the amount of stuff they got. (They did manage to eat most of it, however.) Finally, the speeches. Mercifully, it was now getting cold, so things stayed brief. Long and short of it? Warm Heart is invited back anytime.

Stay posted. We will be going to Ban Arya a lot in the five months before the rains start.

On 14 May, Aisha and I (the HIV/AIDS team) met with Kittichai Kittisaro, a Buddhist monk from Phrao’s Wat Kuam Paak. In the past, Kittichai has organized programs to assist the HIV positive population in Phrao and educate the at-risk population regarding HIV/AIDS. This meeting was important because Kittichai could be a valuable resource and partner Warm Heart’s HIV/AIDS team. Aisha and I briefed Kittichai regarding the type of services and resources our program might entail and we solicited his opinion regarding the direction in which we are heading. He endorsed our plan and provided valuable feedback. The team is excited about collaborating with him in the future!

USC Medical School student intern Aisha writes: John and I have done quite a bit of research in the past few weeks on HIV/AIDS prevention/education—not to mention hours of brainstorming about how to best serve the HIV positive women and children in Phrao. We have participated in two radio shows with DJ Naan-Oun (Pi John)—one where John and I were crushed in a game of paytong after the show, and the other where I told all of Phrao that the world wouldn’t be the same after Michael Jackson’s death. This week, John and I have two meetings in Chiang Mai with NGOs focused on HIV/AIDS work, and are hoping to visit the wat to speak with the HIV positive women there as well. We are excited to here what everyone has to say, and are hoping to get some useful materials from the NGOs we are meeting with!

Warm Heart is bursting with new life. Six new interns have added almost more energy than we can stand and have reinvigorated everyone. They are very task oriented and we are already seeing results. I have set impossible goals for the summer – and have every intention of seeing them accomplished!

Aisha and John are working with HIV+ mothers and their HIV+ kids to develop a support program. What they have learned through interviews so far is that Phrao has some 15 HIV+ kids 12 and under (kids born before access to anti-retrovirals all died). The kids are shunned in the their villages and at school. Their mothers receive medical advice when they or their kids are sick, but no help to be better mothers, to deal with their kids’ questions or their own social isolation. We hope that together with a group of mothers and older children Aisha and John can develop a program that Warm Heart will be able to operate for the – unfortunately – growing population of HIV+ parents and children.

Aisha Scherr-Williams is a 2009 grad from University of Puget Sound and will be attending USC Medical School in the fall; John Arnold is UVA grad who is completing a Masters in Pacific International Affairs at the UCSD School of International and Pacific Studies.

Josh is laboring alone in back of the office to build a prototype solar hot water heater. Hot water is an unknown luxury here – but much appreciated by everyone who has ever tried it! (You need only take an ice cold bucket bath in December when the temperature is 40◦ to appreciate why.) But available heaters are electric, expensive, expensive to operate, and environmentally unfriendly (a large portion of Thailand’s electricity is produced with coal). Josh’s challenge is to harness the sun using recycled materials – old 55 gallon drums and insulation made from flattened Styrofoam food containers (themselves a ubiquitous, non-biodegradable environmental disaster here). If he succeeds soon enough, his next project is to make the Warm Heart Children’s Homes an industrial strength solar rice and soup boiler using an abandoned TV dish.

Josh /Wiener completed the Global PACT Thailand training at Rajabhat University in Chiang Mai in June and will return to Rutgers University in the fall where he is a double major in Political Science and Environmental Policy planning to graduate in 2011.

David, Sylvia and Zack have joined the Microenterprise and Microfinance Project. David and Zack have already assembled a library of microfinance training manuals and teaching materials. We will begin putting together the Warm Heart program next week. (Our clients are way behind the assumed clients of the normal training programs. We will have to back into things a bit more slowly starting with the basics of a family budget and building from there.) Meanwhile Sylvia is designing a microfinance market survey that she and Mae Joom will take into the rice paddies and lamyai orchards next week.

David Rose is a researcher on loan from Prof. Somboon, a senior leader of the Karen people in Thailand. David, an ex-lawyer now engaged full-time in NGO work, is working with Warm Heart in preparation for his work with the Karen. Sylvia and Zack Wagner-Rubin are both MPIA candidates at UCSD IR/PS.

I recently looked at the blog published by Paul Kuehn at Global PACT. I really liked the fact that it combines posts about real people doing real things to solve real problems. It’s not just about how the dot.com billionaires have decided to find a cure for AIDS. It’s about how groups of college students have solved some small but significant problem in their university’s neighborhood using the knowledge they learned in class. I love to have evidence to point to when people say - as so many do - “but what can I do?”

The other thing I like about the Global PACT blog - http://blog.globalpact.org - is that it’s got lots of information about how to make change. After all, wanting to do something is seldom enough, knowing how to do it makes you a whole lot more likely to succeed!

Reading the Global PACT blog also made me think that it would be useful for us to offer links to other blogs that deal with our areas of interest: community development and activism, kids, sustainable development, microenterprise, microfinance, alternative energy and the environment, women and development, public health.

Do you have any favorites to suggest? Please let me know in a comment.

This motto keeps the Warm Heart staff whistling while they work and working while they whistle. The “geejagams,” or activities from this past weekend are a case in that very point.

At 7am on Sunday, the entire Warm Heart staff, donning their pink Warm Heart polo shirts, met the Chiang Mai Lion’s Club at Phrao’s “Tessabon” (community center?) to assist in the distribution of their donations. Warm Heart coordinated their visit and welcomed them with open arms into our community. The Lion’s Club came with enough blankets and care packages for 600 Phrao community members, 300 of which we children. They also made a donation of medical supplies for the three Children’s homes in the Phrao district and had medical personnel on site to provide free check-ups for those present.

In the afternoon, the Warm Heart staff headed to the Phrao Agricultural Center for their very first staff activities day—a day of relay races and games, such as Chair Ball, Capture the Flag, Eggplant Ping Pong, and an 8-Legged Race. Divided into two teams, red and blue, the entire staff enjoyed a day of playful competition and physical activity. In the end, both teams came out on top, and smiling. The night ended with karaoke, bonfires, stargazing, and “camping” in cabins and tents. The following day, Matipan “P’Plew” Wisingtorn and Trireuhat “P’John” Wongsatan led a group on a nature hike on the surrounding mountains trails.

After a location change to a newly constructed lakeside resort in Phrao, the entire staff enjoyed a leisurely afternoon of boating and swimming in the sunshine. In the evening, karaoke recommenced, and the festivities continued. Warm Heart celebrated five successful months of official operation and gave thanks and bid farewell to the four Northeastern Co-op students who are soon to be heading back to snowy Boston. Alicia Genna, David Goldberger, Emily Turner, and Bridget Twohig have been with Warm Heart from its very beginning days. That night all the staff together celebrated the family and love that has grown within Warm Heart’s walls. They all smiled and laughed into the night, under a sky that was smiling right back at them.

Best wishes to our four Northeastern students. We hope you come home again soon!

Warm Heart is continuing to identify issues and inspire solutions within the Phrao community. As the winter season rolls around, the Warm Heart research team has identified 300 adults and 300 children within the Phrao district who are in need of basic living supplies and medical supplies. To help alleviate these demands, Warm Heart has sought the assistance of the Chiang Mai chapter of the Lion’s Club International. The Lion’s Club is an international club that works to raise funds for specific causes related to community development, education, and public health. The Chiang Mai chapter has gathered enough funds to supply these 600 Phrao community members with warm clothing, toothbrushes and toothpaste, sporting equipment for the schools, and blankets. The Lion’s Club members will stay in Phrao this weekend to make the donations and on Sunday will hold a free healthcare clinic for the people of Phrao.

Warm Heart hopes this partnership with the Lion’s Club International will provide warmth and good health to the poorest third of Phrao’s population this winter season. Our most sincere gratitude the Lion’s Club International members for all of their efforts.

Dr. Michael Shafer, Warm Heart’s founder, is also the founder of another unique program that runs hand-in-hand with Warm Heart Thailand. Global PACT is an international training program for social activism for students and now adults. The training takes place in developing countries and builds an international network of individuals able to identify and solve problems in their community.

As a start-up NGO, Warm Heart Thailand is the ideal location for a Global PACT training. The training this past week was the first to explore the unique adult dynamic—bringing adults from the local community together with adults from America. For a week and a half, four American retirees came to Phrao to participate in training workshops with some of the Thai staff. The participants were asked to reflect on the issues they encountered and to identify possible solutions, turning professional skills acquired over a lifetime into tools for social transformation.

The Global PACT training for adults went so well, Warm Heart is looking to run the program again and again. Much thanks to those brave participants and flexible trainers who paved the way!

To learn more about Global PACT, visit www.globalpact.org.

In the early morning rain, I sat in the bed of a pick-up truck, crushed between fellow staff members as we lurched up the rocky mountainside. Finally, I was traveling into the “field,” to visit the hill tribes, to meet face-to-face with those who were the basis for our community development efforts. Our mission was simple—to open a dialogue with our hill-tribe friends in hopes of discovering ways to work with the community to achieve their basic needs—or so we thought.
Journeying up the mountain through wet mud and on broken paths, we passed steep cliffs where I noticed bamboo structures carrying water to the people. I remembered how I drank fresh mountain water from the same bamboo spouts when I first experienced my mother’s homeland of the Philippines as a little girl. After an hour of sliding and getting stuck in ditches, we reached the first village. We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon surveying families, discovering future Warm Heart products, and waiting for our saving grace – a caravan club of off-road trucks called Free Life Off Road Club. This off-road club offered their time, trucks, and donations to Warm Heart’s weekend in the hills of Phrao.
The brigade of super-sized trucks came rumbling to the top of the mountain in time to view the setting sun over the valley of Phrao. The entire Warm Heart staff camped on top of the mountain and I felt a rush of happiness as I experienced another adventurous outing—eating delicious food and singing songs late into the night, the Warm Heart way. The cold night air reminded me of the autumn season at home in Vermont, but I was happy to be with the people here, who I so greatly respect and admire for their desire to solve problems within their own community.
In the morning, we visited three villages. I recognized some of the children who attend the Sanhokfah children’s home in the lowlands of Phrao. This is the children’s home where Warm Heart hosted our health-oriented day camp. Having the children there greatly enhanced the experience of visiting their families and villages. I wanted to, right then and there, make it possible for every child to have the same educational opportunities as I’ve had, as they deserve. Yet while in many of our interviews, parents were certainly concerned about their child’s future in education, they also expressed their concern about their child’s wellbeing at the children’s homes. However, with limited income generated in the mountains, the parents can hardly afford education and the costs of putting their children in better homes doesn’t even seem possible. I felt the struggle of a hill-tribe parent first hand. Warm Heart has identified and is now working to resolve issues with access to healthcare, education, and poverty in these villages to build a better future for these children.
By experiencing and learning of the lives of people living high in the mountains here in Phrao, I felt that I grew closer to my mother who was born in similar situation in the Philippines. As for me, growing up on the other side of the world having anything I ever wanted, I have always wanted to understand my mother and what her life was like so different from mine. I came to Thailand because I want to be part of the change to reduce poverty through micro enterprise. But on a deeper level I’m also learning about both of my parents; how my father lived during his Peace Corp experience in the Philippines and what it means to be my mother’s daughter.

Written by: Emily Turner

Northeastern University

Warm Heart is happy to report that its “Health Oriented Activities Day” was a success! The children at the Sanhokfah children’s home and all 17 Warm Heart staff members really enjoyed a day full of relay races, singing and dancing, arts and crafts, delicious food, and life lessons.

“We managed to incorporate some important health lessons between fun activities,” says Alicia Genna, Warm Heart’s Public Health Liaison. “David Goldberger, our student nurse, checked each of the kids, and this time was able to administer some medicines donated by one of the local clinics. This, as well as little efforts such as washing our hands together before we ate lunch, will really make a difference.”

In collaboration with Northeastern’s chapter of GlobeMed, Warm Heart will continue health lessons and checkups at all three children’s homes in the area. With the help of his local coworkers, David has developed a list of healthcare items he will need in order to conduct these monthly checkups, and GlobeMed has begun fund raising to meet the needs of the three children’s homes collectively housing 150 children, ranging from ages 5 to 15.

Highlights from the first of many activities day include: friendship bracelet making, straw relay races, finger painting with a lesson in hand washing, two birthday cakes in celebration of Chatree “Kru Tie” Saokaew’s birthday, and, of course, lots of singing and dancing.

“We were able to give them food they normally cannot afford, they did arts and crafts that they can keep and be proud of, and they learned to wash their hands with soap – which is a rare commodity there.” Says Emily Turner, who worked with the 5 to 8 year olds, “It was a day of fun for everyone and something different for the kids. It is good to get back to the community.”

All the preparation and practice at the Warm Heart office really paid off. Warm Heart staff members are now shifting their focus to begin planning a Warm Heart Youth Leadership camp for 14 to 17 year old community members in Phrao. This camp will be held next week, October 6 to 10, and will be a Global PACT style workshop to identify and build youth community leaders who will then plan and run a day camp for 5 to 10 year olds during the semester break at the end of this month.