Adopt A Village School.Org

Our First Project

Our first adopted village school was Ban Mahachai School in the rice farming village of Mahachai, Surin province, Issan, Thailand. Ban Mahachai is an hour's drive from the provincial capital of Surin, 470km from Bangkok and 35km from the Cambodian border to the south. School's chicken factory program was initiated independently as a private donor project, not related to Adopt A Village School. Adopt A Village School's goal is to feed the school children directly (2009-08-27).

Surin province is best known for its Elephant Roundup Festival in November, its hand-woven cloth, rattan basket weaving, silver ornaments and Thai jasmine rice. There are also many small Khmer temples dating from the Ankhor era.

The Crisis of Agriculture

Traditionally people have depended on agriculture but rice can be grown for the few brief months when the monsoon rains fall. For about seven months of the year there is no rain and the land is dry and infertile. With an increasing population, growing rice is now no longer a viable way of life and families are split up as parents leave home to find work in the urban centres. There are high levels of family breakdown and deprivation as a result. Children and grandparents depend on the money sent home from the cities, but incomes are so low that often the money never comes. Life is precarious and almost half the children in the school are below the recommended body weight range for Thais of their age.

Mahachai School At It's Best

Our village school has 95 students and is partly constructed of wood. It is more than forty years old and is in a poor state. Following several years of expansion, the Thai economy is fragile and the present government is applying strict discipline to budgetry controls, so there may be some tightening of the purse strings. There is no social security system for poor families or children and the aim of this programme is thus to help the children to make the very best of the education they are given, at first with nutritious lunches, notebooks and clothing.

While most schools have playground equipment, Ban Mahachai school has none. AdoptAVillageSchool Action Program plans to provide funding for a set of swings to be erected during this term break (late October to mid November, 2007). We now need donations to purchase a seesaw and a carousel.

Smart Uniforms Are Essential

Don't let these seemingly well-dressed school kids fool you. The good turnout of the kids suggests the burden placed on families to pay for uniforms to attend schools. On Fridays, all students must wear their traditional Thai cultural dresses to school and not all families can afford them. We are looking for funding to supply this need.

The children study eight subjects each term and families are required to contribute a termly sum for materials, including notebooks, pens and pencils, which often they can ill afford. AdoptAVillageSchool Action Program plans to provide their most expensive item which is notebooks (20% of total) to all the 95 children in school. The sums are not large and a few small donations would provide the other needed school materials for the children.

Full Stomachs are Important Too

This is the kitchen at the Ban Mahachai school. The government provides 60,000 Baht per year for lunches but this only covers basic lunches (about 20 cents each) for the first 100 days. When the money runs out, the school will have to stop serving lunches. AdoptAVillageSchool Action Program plans to assist the children by providing lunches throughout the second term which starts in November, 2007 through to March, 2008 so that the students will not go hungry. We plan to improve the lunches and to add nutritious foods such as papaya, a vitamin rich fruit grown locally.

How Poor Do They Have to Be?

This family home speaks for itself. They are a hard working couple who refuse to be split up by working in Bangkok so they make a marginal living in the village scavenging and selling glass, paper and plastic. Their son, one of the little boys in the picture, comes to school in his uniform as bright as a new pin, but it is a real struggle to achieve this. There is a universal commitment to education and to maintaining appearances but for some families it is just too much. They and their children deserve our support.

The Story So Far
Money has been raised for lunches for one term, for notebooks and for the climbing frame and these projects are going ahead. We need your help now to continue these programs, to buy Thai cultural uniforms for the children, books for the library and other needs to be identified and to adopt and help other village schools.

Please join us and help those less fortunate than ourselves. Thank you very much for your interest.