Orphanage visits
Hi friends,
If you have looked on the gallery you will see that we were able to visit two orphanages and take the children Christmas presents.
There are many orphanges here, filled with children from a range of backgrounds. Many of them have parents still alive but they have been abandoned, their parents may be mentally ill, on drugs or in prison and cannot look after them. Some of them have been intercepted from the trade in children, often from Northern Thailand and Burma down to the south of the country and abroad. Many of the orphanages in the North of Thailand are exclusively these type of orphans and we have friends here who are involved with one of them and are planning a visit in the new year.
Official sources estimate 300,000 children a year are brought across the Burmese border into Thailand as part of the child trade. Some of them in the orphanges have in fact been purchased back off the traders.
The first orphanage is run by a Christian Thai couple and has 32 children. We had a lovely welcome and chatted with the children while they served us drinks. They sang half a dozen songs to us which was fantastic. It was lovely to give them presents that we had chosen for them. Many of them unwrapped their presents very carefully so that they could keep the paper and they used it to form a bag to put their things in afterwards.
The second one we visited was a state orphanage wich Esther has some contacts with. There were 180 children and we took some sweets for the younger ones as they were having a Christmas party that afternoon, which we joined in with. The youngest children were wheeled about in a trolley (see photo).
It was a lovely time for all of us and we wanted to take half of them home with us! Thankyou to everybody who has given us money for Christmas as it enabled us to buy presents for 70 children. It was such a blessing to see their faces and share in their excitement.
We are going to spend Christmas with the Wongs so will be out of touch for a few weeks.
Happy Christmas and much love from Andrew & ESther.