From Mary, who lived at the orphanage for several weeks teaching the staff and children English.
I lived and taught English for two years in Korea to high school students before going into the Charis Project. When I learned I would be teaching the staff as well I was excited to get the chance to teach adults because it is just a whole new dynamic of teaching compared to kids and teenagers. Well, I
learned that there is a reason why people say it is easier to learn a
language when you're young and when your brain is like a sponge and can
pick up almost anything.
I
teach the adults for 2 hours during the day when the kids are at school
and it is definitely a challenge but super rewarding. There are the
full time staff members, consisting of 2 sets of house parents, and
their level of English ranges from zero to a little. So while their level
is almost the same, the learning curve for each of them is very different. Which makes it challenging for a class of 4 students! Everyone in the
village pretty much knows that there is an English speaker at the
orphanage so there have been a few villagers that join the day classes
with the adults.
I've gone over all the letters and the sounds of the
vowels. I did not realize how many sounds each one of our English vowels
has! I've also drilled the standard introduction questions into their
heads and still a couple of the students struggle with it. Often when I ask
"How are you?", I get the response "I am 40 years old."
Juda, one of the house dads, has the hardest time pronouncing many of
the letters and seriously for the letters D, G, H, S, and T, they all
sound like he is saying "F. It's really funny because the other
students hear it too and we just laugh! After a several times of
practice, he just couldn't get it and that is when I just have to learn
to step away and come back to it at a later time!
***For 5 weeks we were privileged to have Mary stay at the children's home in Doi Muser and give English lessons to the children and the staff. What follows is some of her story of the days on the mountain.***
Mary with some of her students. The village kids came for lessons too.
The roosters crow a good hour before the alarm on my
iPhone goes off. I wake up and realize that I am no longer in my
comfortable apartment in Korea, where I taught English for two years.
Instead, I am in a small remote village called Doi Muser, located in the
Tak Province, and hidden up in the mountains of northern Thailand. It
always takes me a few moments to mentally prepare myself for what I will
walk out to and what I can expect for the day after I hit the snooze
button. About a year ago, I emailed Carrien and Aaron Blue about
volunteering and teaching English at the orphanage but little did I know
that this opportunity to volunteer at Doi Muser would enrich my life as
much as it did. Every morning, when I leave my orange room, I am
surrounded by the beautiful green hills that once served as a home for
many of the hill tribes decades ago. Now, the forest is mainly a place
where the villagers hunt for frogs, squirrels, and birds.
Kru Mary has become my new identity, which translates to Teacher
Mary in Thai. "Sawadee-ka Kru Mary" and "Sawadee-krup Kru Mary" are the greetings since my first day at the orphanage. I am not only
their English teacher but also the first foreigner they can actually
just hang out with for longer than a few days. I live with them, eat the same food as them, and
used the same bathroom as them and in so many ways, they have embraced me
into their family as one of them. It doesn't matter that I don't speak
Lahu or Thai and it doesn't matter that I don't look like them. To
them, keeping an open-mind and showing that I actually care and am interested is all they need to feel safe. For me, this is a way to
immerse myself in the hill tribe life style and for them, it is a way
for the children to learn how to build friendships with people from
different parts of their world, gain confidence, learn about the world
around them, and find similarities and embrace differences of people
unlike them. I know I have a big responsibility but I am ready to take
it on.
Naturally, it took many of the kids time to get accustomed to my
being here. Some of them even thought it was strange that I was still
here after a few days had gone by and a couple of the teenagers asked the translator when I was going home. When they learned that I
was staying for 5 weeks, they just gasped in shock. After the first
week or so, it has become a routine for the younger kids to hang out and
swing on the hammock outside my room, singing "Merry Christmas, Merry
Christmas to you to you all. Merry Christmas, merry Christmas to you
all!" It's March. I smile as I watch them sing proudly and
loudly every morning, and it doesn't matter if it's March or December,
it's an English song and they are happy to serenade me with it almost
every morning.
There is something that has come up in a few conversations recently that I feel I should make clear.
We often refer to Ban Saeng Sawan, the home in Doi Muser, Thailand where we are, and have been for several years, developing a model for entrepreneurially based care and empowerment for at-risk children as an "orphanage."
This is unintentionally misleading.
In the minds of most people when they hear the term "orphanage" in pops a picture of a crowded, cold, impersonal institution. An institution that, if it avoids abuse, maybe at best gets as good as mild neglect in what passes for the care it provides for the resident children.
That picture doesn't come to mind for anyone who has been to Ban Saeng Sawan. This is true for both local people and international visitors. The first factor is that our primary house-parents are parents. Judah and Saeng Chan have two children and another on the way and have adopted a fourth. Judah's brother Jonah and his wife Dao Saeng are the second house parents and they live there with their two children. Judah and Jonah's parents live in a neighboring village and are often around helping and spending time with the kids. There is a number of other people, cousins, aunts, uncles of the staff and children who come over and help out with repairs and upkeep on the house, with cooking, with spending time with and passing knowledge on to the kids.
When we are talking about Ban Saeng Sawan we are not talking about some institutional gulag. Rather, we are talking about an integrated community, a group of people that cares and supports, an extended family where there is always room for one more. And, far from being personally or emotionally stunted, the children are very literate in compassion even to people they have just met (here is a link to a blog post by Carrien Blue, see the last few paragraphs for a little story that illustrates the emotional maturity of the children of Ban Saeng Sawan.)
There is a lot of talk in some circles, and much debate, as to the best way to help and care for orphans. We at The Charis Project firmly believe that the first thing to try in terms of orphan care is to empower that child's community, wherever possible, to care for that child themselves. This goes far beyond providing aid money, which is often actually counter-productive to our end goal, it goes to empowering communities to help each other. When we talk about teaching communities to become entrepreneurs, to bring change and effective solutions to the situations they live in every day, we are not just talking about economics. We are talking about building more communities such as the one at Baan Saeng Saiwan. We are talking about how to build that integrated, caring, and supporting community in which children whose own families have broken down have the love and support of an entire extended family that is invested in seeing them succeed.
Building a community, starting with caring for children, and doing it from the in-side-out, sure seems to be working here!
This is an option that we urge those who want to be on the effective side of rescuing and caring for orphans to take up the cause for and do everything in your power to make more available for children and communities all over the world.
On our Face Book page a short while ago I said that it looked as though we were on a layup for a slam-dunk. This is what I was talking about.
We have been working with a group of people in Mae Sot for about a year. We have been moving slowly and working at getting to know each other and to understand how, and if, our visions intersect and how, and if, we will be able to work well together.
That work is ready to take the next step.
On this last trip we spent an extended period of time discussing in-depth where to move forward and they were already on-board with where we see going.
The de facto leader of the group is named Philip. His father-in-law led in founding a college for hill-tribe peoples and Philip worked there as a teacher. In fact he was one of *Judah and Saeng Chen's teachers when they went there.
This group in Mae Sot is already working responsibly to build up, support, and empower children of the Burmese migrant and refugee community in the area. They have very little in terms of resources aside from the income they themselves earn as laborers and they do not ask for handouts. Instead they have been envisioning businesses that they could start to do a better job of supporting the work they are doing with the children.They are educated, they are motivated, they are hard-working, and they have already begun to innovate.
They do not want to live on donations because they see begging, even for a very good cause, as a weakness that they would very much like to avoid.
Philip and I excited about our vision for moving forward in Mae Sot
They are about the perfect partners for the Charis Project. They are thrilled with our vision for integrating entrepreneurism and the care for at-risk children. They see that what we envision pushes beyond what they thought possible and are excited to bring this all together. They and we are becoming us.
They brought to our discussions two or three business ideas that they had already been thinking about and over the course of our conversations we together came up with half-a-dozen more workable business concepts.
Now, the step we are working on next, is to model, assess, and select the best of these concepts to move forward on, to invest in, and to launch as the financial and entrepreneurial-education foundation of the empowering work with the children living out in the teak plantations and bamboo thickets.
A few of the kids and another of the team members at Mae Sot
Obviously we are very excited and are chomping at the bit to be on site to work directly with them as we launch this new Charis Community and take what we learn here to feed back into the Doi Muser home to build it up even further.
This is Ketisek, two years ago, when he first came to Baan Saang Saiwan.
His ambition was to be a doctor when he grows up.
"I want to study hard because I was very lonely in the past. Now I have a better life. Because I do not have parents I will do my best for my life."
This is Ketisek one year later.
This is Ketisek a week ago, when he chose to be baptized.
This year he starts high school.
I don't know if you can see it, but that loneliness that used to be in his eyes at the beginning, I don't see it anymore. I see a young man with confidence, ready to begin the rest of his life, with people around him who care and will help him get there.
This is what your sponsorship of Baan Saang Saiwan has accomplished for this one boy, and many other children as well.
Thank you, for being there for him, when he was all alone. Never doubt you are making a difference.
In November of 2012 Carrien Blue, who has been serving as CFO since The Charis Project incorporated in 2010, resigned from her position. Carrien, as many of you know, is expecting her 5th child, and she and her family are planning a move to Thailand early in 2013 in order to provide hands on education and training for the final phase of transitioning Baan Saang Sawan, our prototype children's home, to financial independence. For more details go here.
It was time to hand the financial reigns over to someone else. Fortunately, there was a qualified and willing candidate nearby.
It is our pleasure to introduce to you Emmet Blue, The Charis Project's new CFO. Not only is he well qualified to fill the position, he agreed to do so without being compensated, a huge criterion in an organization our size, with such a limited budget.
Emmet has a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from Faulkner University and a Masters Degree in theology and intercultural studies from Fuller seminary. The past 3 years he has spent most of his time in the 3rd world working with various NGO's that provide aid to kids. For 2 years he was in Uganda, working with Children's Heritage Foundation, training local leaders and heading up and coordinating projects with volunteers.
Most recently, Emmet spent the bulk of 2012 in Haiti, also with Children's Heritage Foundation, overseeing an orphanage they were just assuming the directorship of and facilitating the transition.
His depth of experience, both in business and finance, as well as in international aid and orphan care, make him the perfect candidate to be at the head of The Charis Project's financial development in the years to come.
Beginning January 2013, all enquiries regarding donations and finance can be directed to Emmet at emmetblue@thecharisproject.org
We are so grateful for his willingness to serve you and the children we are all working to help.
We have always anticipated that we would need to have staff in Thailand on a more permanent basis so that our training of local staff and project development could go forward more smoothly. The time has finally come to make that happen.
Latest picture of everyone at the orphanage.
When our board of directors met earlier this year the biggest need we identified was to have someone on the ground in Thailand overseeing the projects. A motion to move in that direction was unanimously approved and since then we have been taking steps toward that.
If all goes as planned Aaron Blue, our CEO, along with his wife Carrien Blue - currently serving as CFO, and their 4 children will be moving to Thailand in the spring of 2013 to oversee the final transition of our prototype home in Doi Muser from financially dependent to fully self sustaining, and continue to build the orphan care community model in Mae Sot.
We need your help to raise enough money to make this happen. Please give and share this post.
As you know, to this point all of our staff have been volunteer, doing the work on evenings and weekends and in their spare time. Aaron and Carrien have carried most of the weight in this regard. Over the past 5 years, without any compensation, as you have partnered with us, we have:
-Taken care of more than 60 kids -Trained 4 staff members to think long term and solve problems in an entrepreneurial way
-Incorporated as a 501c3 non-profit called The Charis Project with a board of directors and everything that goes along with that. -Got a truck so the kids could get safely to school that they then began using to bring the home income by using it for a transport business as a school bus and for farmers going to market.
-Conceptualized a model for self sustaining orphan care through entrepreneurship that makes homes for children at risk financially independent and empowers communities to care for the children in need among them. Please see the video below. -Began working to make that concept a reality in our prototype children's home Baan Saeng Saiwan
-Purchased land for the home to develop for agribusiness that now has maturing coffee trees on it as well as other agriculture products and to raise their own food on.
And finally, received a grant this year for $15,000 to develop a second child care community in Mae Sot, this time from the ground up, with business development and entrepreneurship at it's roots and as part of it's DNA. We will be empowering women especially to be the financial providers for their families and able to care for the children without families that we bring to them as well, through education, training support etc.
But as they go to Thailand and devote all of their time to seeing this project through, we have reached the point where they must be supported financially in order to be able to do this.
To that end we have created a specific fund for Educational Development in Thailand that will pay them a living wage as they move forward with this work. (They will not be living at the orphanage, though they will be there often, because the idea is to empower and help the staff to manage everything on their own. Such close proximity would harm that blossoming independence.)
We need your help to make this a possibility.
The total minimum threshold we need to raise is $30, 000. We currently have approximately $7500 in the fund.
We need about $22,500 more. Which is just over 1000 people giving $20. That shouldn't be
hard. That's you and 99 of your facebook friends, times 10. If 10 of you
donated $20 and got 99 of your friends on facebook to do so also, we'd
be done.
What would be even better is if half of those people decided to donate every month for a year or two, until the project is complete. That would greatly increase our options for accelerating our development.
Please Give. And Please Share this need with others.
You are the community that has supported the work of The Charis Project from the start and believed in what we are trying to accomplish. You are The Charis Project. The Blues when they go are simply extensions of you and your generosity, care and enthusiastic advocacy for children in impoverished communities.
Also, we've had a local business here in San Diego that embodies the entrepreneurial ideals of The Charis Project called PUREFORGE donate a brand new iPad to raffle off for every donation of $20. You know, to make it fun.
You get to choose your color
So donate $20 and get one raffle entry. Donate $40, you get 2 entries, etc . We'll be making the draw on the 1st of November. (Want another chance to win this iPad? Post this link on twitter or facebook. Just be sure to @charisproject or tag us on facebook in your post so we can see it.)
Or, if you can't spare $20 just donate $5, $1, whatever you can. We have some other prizes coming up that you will be eligible to win. Even $1 donations add up if enough people give. If all 300+ of our facebook fans gave $1 and convinced 99 of their facebook friends to give $1, that would accomplish our entire minimum goal.
What will this accomplish? Well, if we keep doing it the way we have done the orphanage would be self sufficient in another 4-5 years, and our second prototype community would be off the ground in maybe 7-10, with the rate we're going in terms of being available to actively train and work with them.
That means we would have to wait at least 10 years or more before going into Nepal, Ethiopia or Latin America where we've been asked to come and train people to do the self sustaining model. We just don't have the resources and manpower to do it any sooner. We could keep changing the world slowly, so that in 2 generations perhaps we've done something about the extreme poverty that children all over the world live in, especially those without stable families, and the factors that contribute to it.
Or we could get two working prototype self sustaining childcare models up and running inside of 2 or 3 years, and have the momentum from that to carry us forward into being a resource for people from all over the world.
We have already been tapped to consult with orphanages in other countries as we are able, including a group of Harvard MBA students working to make an orphanage in Nicaragua more self sustaining.
This is leading toward our ultimate goal of revolutionizing the approach to care for vulnerable children by leveraging the means used to support their care to being the means by which their communities are transformed.
