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ABC Newsletter September

After 3 months hard graft;

(which I neglected to mention also featured some much appreciated help from our good friend Heather, of the Faa Gamma Fund raising team, and her family who were over on a visit and helped us prepare the playground area and first fence)

;getting the house and grounds ready and starting the process of registering The Foundation; the grounds were looking pretty barren but safe and all the furnishings and fitting of fans , etc finished.

We also had two brand new shower/toilets blocks built to ensure adequate facilities.

With a possible 14 residents all needing to get ready for school in the morning this was seen as a must do.

We were then waiting on the registration process which can take a very long time.

Many checks by City Hall, the Police and local authorities.

Determined to do things right we had not planned to open officially or take any children before this process was finished.

At the time I was working as a Volunteer English teaching assistant at a rural Thai school.

When one of their pupils stopped coming to school, one of the Teachers, knowing that we were setting up the Foundation, explained that the boy had been sent back home from his placement in a Lamphun Childrens Home and was no longer receiving regular education, and worse still, was back in what was seen by many as an abusive and neglectful home situation. The Teacher cared very much for the boy and asked if we could help.

The nature of “care” means that as much as you may want to follow protocol, sometimes you simply can not turn your back.

Knowing the boy, knowing his woeful situation and knowing that Stratton House was fit and ready to accommodate we simply could not ignore this call for help.

 So, after a home visit and first hand assessment of his situation,  and with the request for a placement coming, not only from his teacher but, his wider family also , we took our first child into the care of The Stratton ABC Foundation on Nov 1st 2009.

Within 3 a month the same fate beset two young girls who had been attending the same school, evicted from their previous placement. Once again the Teacher asked us for help.

After home visit, assessment and request from the family we agreed to help.

One of the pledges we make here at The Stratton ABC Foundation is that once a child has been given a placement they become one of the “Family”.

The nature of a Childrens Home means that children who come here may well come with many problems. We are here to care and will do our utmost to do the best we can for each and every child, and ending a placement would only ever happen if we felt that The Stratton ABC Foundation was not able to give the best service that any particular child needed.

In such a case we will always do all we can to find other services to ensure that the child gets the best care.

If you missed the last “Recollections” post follow the link below.

Recollections (part 1)

We would all like to say thankyou very much to all the members of the Faa Gamma Team for your continued efforts and support;

and thanks also to anyone who contributed to this appeal.

They stayed for dinner and met all the kids and before they left we agreed to a Xmas visit when they will hopefully be staying with us here in Stratton House for a few days.

15 year old Jemsai is studying child care back in Australia and is keen to use her visit to gain experience.

They also very generously donated 1000 baht to enable us to purchase turf for our ongoing garden improvements.

Big thanks to you both for your help , the turf has already been laid:)

We look forward to seeing you again at Xmas.

Childrens Day is an annual event in Thailand, held on the second weekend in January, where a lot of effort is put into making a special day for all children.

Personally I prefer it to Xmas as there is no religious pretence, just blatant spoiling of the children for a day.

Indeed many children get more than one day as the schools often hold their own ‘Childrens Day’ on the Friday, as they did at Pasak School, where I teach.

It was not an easy decision as to where to take the children from Stratton House on Childrens Day; so many events, large and small, to choose from.

In the end we elected to follow advice given by a local friend and take them to Airforce 41 Base, close to Chiang Mai Airport, where, we were told , there would be several aircraft on display and lots of interesting stuff going on.

Hindsight is a pretty useless thing as, but in hindsight it was not such a good descision for us.

It certainly was a big affair with thousands of local families attending. Our problem was the numbers and lay-out. From the car parking area there was quite along route to walk to get to where all the aircraft and activities were.

This route was lined with hundreds of stalls selling all manner of clothes, toys, nic-nacs, food, etc; so many distractions for the kids within a narrow walkway packed with hundreds of people.

Within 10 minutes we had lost the two older boys. Although confident that they could look after themselves we still needed to locate them incase an emergency caused us to need to leave. Everyone had been issued with a card with phone number to ring if our group got seperated.

Leaving the other children at The Bouncy Castle with Wasana, our house Mum, myself and Boon went on a search. Nearly 2 hours later after much searching and numerous tannoy calls we bumped into the 2 boys on the way back to the car, blissfully unaware of the stress they had caused.

Lucky it was Childrens Day and they got away with  stern instruction not to wander off again. In view of the crowds and difficulty in keeping the group together we then left Airforce 41 and drove into Chiang Mai to Kad Suan Kaow Shopping Mall where there was a special Childrens Day playground set up in the centre ‘garden’.

After lunch in the Food Court in the lower level of the Mall we took the Children to the fun and games in the central garden area.

The two older boys were given the job of acting as extra eyes to keep an eye out for the younger ones as they joined the fun.

Being a much more contained area the crowds were not such a problem and the kids had a great afternoon.

It was late afternoon , early evening when they got their special Childrens Day surprise, made possible by the generous efforts of the Faa Gamma fundraising team in Australia.

The team kindly held a special Xmas appeal to raise money to purchase bicycles for the children to use and enjoy.

We were able to buy four bicycles for the children to share and these were presented to the children on their return to Stratton House.

Apologies for the poor photo quality.

Many thanks to our good friend Heather and all her team; the kids love the bikes and use them everyday as soon as they return from school.

For more photos from Childrens Day please visit our photobucket album here.

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.