Warm Heart at Work

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.

It is July 4th weekend and while Americans celebrate the launch of the boldest political experiment of its day, Warm Heart is celebrating surviving its first year. Perhaps we, too, will go on to great things, but I suspect that the founding fathers would empathize with Carole, Evelind, P’Tie and me and our experience of the day-to-day reality of leading a start-up! Every day is a surprise, a party, a scary roller coaster ride, a frustration, a fantasy, a moment of terror and a flash of inspiration.

At our first 4th of July BBQ we released a traditional Thai hot air balloon lantern. As it rose into the light rain, P’Tie turned to me and said: “The farther it goes, the better our luck.” I watched it as it rose higher and higher in the dark sky until it was the only glowing speck in the sky. It went longer and farther than any of the others in the Phrao sky that night. So far our luck is holding.

Here’s to our second year.

Happy Birthday, America!

Happy Birthday, Warm Heart!

Wandering around at ground level, I am amazed by what we have created in the past few months, but a couple of days ago I got a whole new perspective on our realm. P’Win and his crew hauled the tower for the water tanks erect and when it was secure, I climbed to the top. Here’s what Warm Heart looks like “from the air.”

Warm Heart Micro-finance Project made its first loan last week. It was a not entirely disinterested loan, since our first customer is P’Tai, the owner of the restaurant immediately across the street from the office. We love her food and we appreciate how smart her decision was to locate opposite the local government complex and just down the road from the biggest employer in the district.

The Micro-Finance Project loan - a huge 23,000 baht (about $650) - gives P’Tai the working capital to buy her supplies wholesale and weekly, rather than retail and daily, and to expand her evening business selling beef BBQ, beer and whiskey. If her projections are correct, she should be able to double her daily income from 200 to 400 baht (about $5.75 to $11.50).

For P’Tai, who lives in a “room” that is actually the open end of an agricultural shed with her two boys, ages 9 and 11, this increase in income is the difference between staying dirt poor forever and the chance to make it. According to the terms of her loan, every week when she makes her loan payment she is required to deposit an equal amount in a savings account. (This is the first time in her life that she has ever had savings.) At the end of the one year term of her loan, she will have savings worth the 23,000 baht of the loan principal plus the 6% interest the WHMF Project will pay her - three times what a bank would pay IF they would accept her as a client.

For individuals such a P’Tai, micro-finance of the sort that Warm Heart will be offering is crucial. The poor in Phrao have no access to the formal banking sector because they don’t have enough money to qualify to open accounts and because they don’t own anything that would qualify as collateral in the eyes of a loan officer. They do have access to a thriving informal money lending sector - at interest rates that start at 5% per month (60% per year) for the best credit risks and go to 20% per month (240% per year) for the poorest of the poor.

At the rates available to the poor, there are no legal investments worth making. At the rates the Warm Heart Micro-finanace Project will offer - 12% per year - combined with “forced” savings at 6% a large number of business opportunities open up from the expansion of tiny restaurants such as P’Tai’s to tire repair shops and laundries.

It is really hot and dry in Phrao right now, especially at our land! Everything is covered with a fine red dust. But there is hope. The TCNJ Engineers Without Borders team arrives in just a couple of days to bring us water. Praise the Lord. We cannot wait.

The TCNJ team surveyed our land last summer and spent the academic year developing the plans for a site-wide water management system. Their plan calls for a deep well (more than 80 meters) with a solar pump, a huge underground storage tank, a water tower crowned by two shiny stainless steel tanks and then a web of 4″ pipes that run across the entire property.

The ten member team will (somehow) be bringing the donated solar pump with them when they fly in on May 20th. In preparation for their arrival, Warm Heart’s contractor has been hard at work building the basics. The slab for the tower is in, the pipes for the tower itself have been delivered and the hole for the underground tank has been excavated.

For the time being we are surviving on bottled drinking water and wash water pumped out of the fish pond, so we cannot wait for that solar pump to arrive! But every day with offer thanks to the TCNJ Engineers Without Borders team. Without them we have no idea what we would have done. After all, they not only designed the entire system - they have raised every penny the entire project will cost!

Warm Heart has only the warmest thanks for the TCNJ EWB team - our largest donors to date!

The first group of kids is settling in. For the moment we have just five, two boys and three girls. Nung Min is expected any day (in fact we may take a field trip to Kung Pan to get her) and others are in process.
Move-in day was perfectly orderly from an adult, logistical point of view, but the kids were just overwhelmed. On Sunday P’Oy, Nung Oy and P’Pleu played get-to-know you games with the kids (who also didn’t know each other). The two highlights of the day were writing and illustrating autobiographies and planting flowers. You can get a feel for each of our kids by looking at their autobiographies, which I’ve posted below (and of course if you read nine year old Thai, you can read all about them). As for the flowers, the Thai staff members donated potted plants from their own homes so that the kids would have the beginnings of a garden. Later this week, P’Pleu and the kids will go to a nursery to chose seedling.

Meet Nung Ful

Meet Nung Max

Meet Nung New

Meet Nung Suda

Meet Nung Oam

The kids came a day early. We discovered this 12 hours before they were to show up. This created quite a tizz. Dirty and smelly as we all were, we hopped in the truck and rushed to town to buy sleeping mats, sheets, gas cooker, cooler and everything else we needed in the half hour before stores closed. We made it, but just. If nothing else, our outrageous appearance and the volume of our purchases occasioned lots of questions and resulted in great PR!

A picture is worth a 1,000 words - so why try to tell you about move-in day? Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of the scene. For those of you who are students or have college age kids, the whole thing looked and went exactly like move-in day on campus - without the traffic jam.

The house was ready.

The bathrooms were ready.

The chicken house was ready.

The staff was ready - and waiting.

Nung Oam was waiting.

Finally! It took three and a half hours to get down from the mountain. The required circle on the floor.

Not everyone was immediately enthralled.

At times it really did seem a bit over the top.

But teddy bears rule, even in Thailand.

For the past week the Warm Heart staff as worked like stoats under the Thai hot season sun to prepare for the kids’ arrival. The homes are done! But of course the construction crew left a minor disaster behind - cement bags, energy drink bottles, broken bricks and tiles, etc. And no one had pruned our lamyai and banana orchards for years. So guess what we did? That’s right.

We picked up.

We swept.

We took restful breaks.

We had a lot of fun.

Mae Joom is camera shy.

Tara is not.

P’Pieu is philosophical.

P’Toon is just crazy.

Take a minute - literally - to watch Dan Christopher’s great short about the start of construction at the Children’s Homes site. And stay tuned! We will have photos of the nearly completed homes later today or tomorrow! The construction deadline is the 27th and we are on schedule.
Warm Heart Homes Under Construction