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Just to let you know that our photo links for specific donations, such as sponsoring drinking water or food purchase, are now live once more.
These links give you the chance to donate and know exactly what your money will be used for.
There will be further improvements made to the system very soon, thanks for your patience 
Well I have to say I’m allowing myself a modicum of pride seeing our total hits since August 2010 break the 10,000 mark.
Its nice to know that so many have looked in.
What we really need is, for those of you who look in and agree that we are doing a good thing here, to hit that donate button and help ensure that we can continue, develop and hopefully build our permanent facility.
You can also donate by direct bank transfer if you prefer.
We are seeing great things from the children here that suggest promising futures for the few who reside here. We would very much like to increase our work to help many more disadvantaged children here in Northern Thailand.
As you can see by our recently added monthly target meter we are presently running on a little over half the donations we need simply to break even. Up until now the shortfall each month has been made up by the Foundations Director. This is not an infinitely feasible situation.
So please, if you are looking in, and like what we are doing please consider giving whatever you can spare, every little helps.
To all those who have volunteered here in the past and support our work please consider our Gamma Teams iniative.
Thanks for visiting.
This month is shaping up to be a very busy month for me. With the children back to school I now have to turn my full attention to increasing our donations and sponsorship.
Considering the work we do, I believe that our monthly target for basic running costs; which includes staff wages, food, utilities, school fees etc is a reasonable and efficient budget.
It is possible that some viewing this site may get the impression that we are already well funded. To get the help we need we need to get over this and for this reason I have now added a Donations target thermometer. This will be updated regularly as funds come in.
If you like what we are doing please help us reach that target. Any surplus will then go into our second target for building our permanent facility…… evaluation of the costs of this project are still in progress but an initial estimate is 5 million baht. ( approximately 106,000 pounds sterling.)
The inspiration of Art continues here at Stratton House and is not restricted to the children alone as I have been drawn to add to the kitchen Murals myself.
The best part of doing this is that it has then inspired the children to do even more , coming up with their own designs on the wall opposite.
If you like Art, keep watching as there is much more wall space still left to fill and 10 children who are loving developing their artistic skills.
If you’d like a closer look, why not pay us a visit….donations appreciated
Firstly I would like to apologise to any of the Art Relief International Volunteers who may have been upset by yesterdays post suggesting that the playground was not quite finished. We are all very grateful for all the very hard work put in by everyone and the children have already had lots of fun using the playground over the last couple of days. We would also like to thank all those that contributed to the Art Relief Appeals for funds to make it happen. Your donations have made the children here very happy.
Thanks to a rapid response to our appeal for funds to complete the fence this should be completed today and we look forward to seeing you all sometime in the week for the official “Opening Party”.
Yesterday all of the children got busy with paint brushes to brighten up the walls around the playground and look forward to working with Art Relief on more Mural work in the near future to make the play area even nicer.
Thanks again all…great job:)
Everyone here at Stratton House would like to say a big thankyou to the Gray Family and hope their onward travels go well and that they all enjoy a very happy New Year.
During their week long stay at Stratton House they helped out so much, not just with donations for the lawn, garden tools, a weeks worth of food shopping and more; but also lots of great ideas to help with our garden projects; spending time with the kids helping out with, homework etc. Bruce and Jemsai spent alot of time with Jack which was a great help, he does so much better with the 1-1 attention.
Special thanks to Mary for all her garden hints, some of which we have put into operation straight away.
It was a moving farewell at Chiang Mai Airport as Mary caught her flight to Phuket and Bruce and Jemsai went off on their onward travels to.
Thankyou you once again for all your support and we look forward to staying in touch.
First, apologies for a long delay in updating but we are still waiting for onsite internet connection.
This week has seen us busy with our welcome visitors from Australia, Heather, Luca and Chloe from the Faa Gamma Fund raising Team.
Heather arrived last Thursday, along with a couple of bags of clothes collected in Australia, and was very keen to get on with anything to help us progress with prepping the home. Amongst other things she helped with giving the walls a good scrub in the kitchen/eating area.
She also got her design head on and went to work producing a model of how our playground may end up. This was very useful and inspirational and we decided to immediately go ahead with the ‘pencil’ fence.
After a ride around looking for appropriate looking fence post material, we settled on bamboo, which, at 20 baht for an approximately 6metre length, seemed the most cost effective.
To be sure, we first purchased just one length, cut into the sizes we wanted and with points chopped for driving into the ground. Back at Stratton House we drove the four lengths in to check that it was what we wanted. Agreeing tha this should work fine we went ahead and ordered 70 lengths, (paid for by Heather)which should be enough to complete the job.
It turns out that the supplier we ordered from is just one old guy on his own most of the time and not only could he not cut that many to size for us but he could only supply us with 40 lengths for now as the rest is still in the forest waiting to be cut. Still, this was more than enough to go on with.
Heathers partner Luca, and his daughter Chloe arrived on Monday, the same day as the Bamboo and we soon had a good bit of team work going.
For the next few days, Heather and co would go off doing ‘holiday stuff’ in the day, when it was too hot to work, and then return to pitch in with Boon and myself, preparing the fence posts.
The first session involved cutting to size, sanding, and chopping the driving points. Boon and Luca took turns with the cutting and chopping whilst the girls sanded like crazy.
All these posts then needed priming and then glossing in a variety of colours and everyone pitched in with this.
The visit was over before we knew it and its a shame we hadn’t got as far as putting any of the fence up before Faa and her team left. But it was an extremely useful few days help and encouragement and we hope to be driving the first of the fence posts in tonight when the sun eases off.
Once again we would like to thanks Heather, Luca and Chloe for their help and further donations of clothes, bedsheets and games for the kids.
For all the photos from the visit please visit our photobucket album here.
