Now it’s come to an end for this year’s KFAM project. 7 schools were part of it and at least 220 children got direct benefits from this project
This year, our stress for seeking support for construction budget was enormously decreased due to the fast that we had an anonymous donor who take care of all these cost which made all school construction can start on time and much more easy in every steps. So, we will start from sharing results of construction first.
1/7 Baan Sob Hard school ; We were able to fix all electrical systems, and provide more LED lamps to light up the school. New Battery can provide more capacity and currently they have enough power to supply the Television. When we visited, the kids are watching Cartoons during the wait. Also, the fence was already finished, now the vegetables that are grown in the school are completely safe and sound from their free range cows and pigs.
2/7 Ra-ar Nok school : This school is actually the best result which made us the most delighted. Last time during dry season, school members and villagers have to walk down a hill and travel a long distance to collect water from the well for everyday usage. After we rectified the water system and installed a pump (which can be removed when no longer in use), connect irrigation system, and piping to be able to store in water tank which raised up quality of living for children and villagers. As for power system which was well rectified and also some electric cables were replaced with new ones which lighten up the school a lot. As for the dishwashing sink that we installed this can provide better hygiene for the kitchen.
3/7 Huay Kanoon school : Our support was mainly for building, starting from a termite problem,, build new school roof, add some brickworks to prevent insects and reptiles, connecting sinks in the kitchen. In our opinion, the improvement will be no longer needed at this school for a while.
4/7 Huay Yab school : Actually before we arrived, there is another team came to support building maintenance , so floor tiles are in good condition, Brickworks are already done but it appears we have ran out of budget but still left some important point which is roof leakage and a beam that was very old and weathered, therefore we provided support at this point. Although the beam may look slightly sagged it is made from new timber so, it is completely safe. As for sink and transformer they are not yet finished yet but it will be very soon. We also provided 2 kindergarten desks when our team were on site.
5/7 Chuimo School (Our volunteers based here during the trip): We updated the power system that makes the school brighter and better power storage. The floor of the school was changed to ceramic tiles for easy maintenance and eliminating noise when walking on. We added a gas stove and a burner to the kitchen to facilitate cooking for the teachers.
6/7 Loogoodoo School: We changed the floor to ceramic tiles for easy cleaning and added 2,000-litre water tank. Now the school should have enough water supply during drought. We added a sink for the kitchen to have a proper cleaning area.
7/7 Mae Ra-Ar Nai: updated the power system. The school also requests internet system as the coverage reached the school area. No problem with installation. We also fixed the fence at the front of the school
There were no issues with the constructions. The villagers, teachers, and the soldiers at each location had been working well together to build the schools. The expenses are far less than other places we have been to, because the teacher and soldiers helped putting in their labour and helped save costs anyway they can.
We approved additional paint to 5 out of 7 schools and delivered paint to each school during the activity day, except for Chui Mo School that our volunteers had finished painting during the trip.
Donation items to the schools: we delivered the donation items to each school on the activity day. Other than 5 of 7 schools that will receive desks and chairs, we believed to have cover all items. From teaching instruments, books, storages, sports goods, kitchen items, gardening tools, cleaning tools, dry food, condiments, safety kids, and many more.
In terms of donation items to the kids, we didn't hold anything back as always. We have back-to-school items like pencils, notebooks, coloring pencils, etc. Then we have personal items such as clothes, underwear, towels, soaps, aluminum cups, pillow, and such. Dry goods such as rice noodles and vermicelli. What’s new this year are umbrellas and boots requested by the teachers. We were told that it would get muddy during the rainy season, where regular sandals usually get destroyed and villagers don’t usually have umbrellas. We added backpacks for each student and give big bag of rice to the schools, instead of small portion to each student like we have done in previous years.
As the number of students in the initial 5 selected schools are fewer than expected, so we invited students from 2 schools in the same group, Chokpok and Huei Gaipa School, to also join on the activity day. We have enough donation items, so the kids from the 2 new schools were all able to receive the donation items.
We received also a large amount of second-hand clothes for adults. Thank you everyone for donating second-hand clothes to us. They were enough to give to all 7 schools, 2 big sacks each, to bring back to their community. We also have enough to give to all villagers and pre-school kids that attended the event. We hope that we could get second-hand clothes donated enough for the coming years, so we could give the clothes to all villagers like we have done this year.
It can be a long story to tell about the activities we did for this year project as we all, the kids, volunteers, teachers, the army special force team, and all villagers, have had an unforgettable experience together.
Day 1: We travelled with all the donated stuff to our based area up on the mountain. We were so confident that task for this Day 1 can be an easy piece as we only simply traveled to the area with all the donated stuff / stop by along the way to check all the construction work we did prior the trip / grouping/categorizing all the donated stuff / and put up the sleeping tent for all the volunteer team. However, this year, we faced with quite number of obstacles, i.e., one of our pick-up truck hit the school water pipe caused breakage of the pipe right at the front of the school. This year, we received so many donated stuff but we have very limited 4-wheel big truck, we can only carry small amount of stuff at a time. The place where we considered as our base is too small to store all the donated stuff, not only for storing, we used this place as to group and categorize whether all the second-hand clothes that we can say we received more than thousand pieces or hundreds of toys required even more space. The limited space dragged us a bit to not be able to push as fast as we want. We worked from early afternoon and continued working until sunset, even dinner was ready, but our sleeping tents have not put up yet. Though number of obstacles we needed to pass through on this first day, the Special Army Force team and all the Volunteers gave all their hands to pass this through. We finally managed to get the Day 1 done as planned though more struggling than expected.
Day 2: We started our second day at 5 o’clock in the morning by the Breakfast Cooking Team. Though we were not disturbed by the morning chicken song but all of us still showed up on time. The Chef Lead from the school is Teacher Jack, she was there helping us until last day of our site visiting. She made cooking for number of people seems to be very easy, we only followed her guidance and nice meal were magically served to all of us.
We arranged activities and games for all the kids from three schools. There were 60 kids altogether. We took this chance to get ready for our big day. The kids were way too little and most of them were unable to speak Thai. They only spoke their local language (Ka-Riang language). This made a huge challenge for us to have a deep think on how to handle all the kids on our big day. There was no problem to the Cooking Team, only that they needed to cook for all the 60 kids plus all the team. But such big number of kids could not really bother the Cooking Team. Everything went well. We just wondered that the Khao Soy (Thai-Northern spicy noodle) which was the Lunch menu for all the kids, would not it be too spicy for them. But this was not really a big concern as we saw the kids really enjoyed a big piece of chicken wing. Or even some of them finished all the soup, or even asked for a second round! The spicy soup cannot stop the kids to enjoy this Khao Soy.
We added one more activity for today, it was “Trash Picking-Up activity”. We encouraged the kids to walk around the school and their village to pick up all the trash that was on the floor. We found that whether the villagers or the kid’s parents just get rid of all their trash by just throwing it away, just that it was not stay in their shelter that was considered as fine. At first, we can see that the kids completely have no idea what we were trying to do. But once we did the trash picking up with them, making it as another fun game, then the kids found it was fun and enjoyed picking up the trash a lot. No matter what they found on the floor that looked not belong to the floor, i.e., with color like some part of the plastic bag or the milk carton, they grabbed those rightaway. Not only the kids learned getting rid of the trash from this activity, the villager started to get rid of those trash as well, and not throw them away as before.
Now let’s move to the Construction Team, they went out to check all the construction work from other four schools. We also divided another small team as “In-School Construction Team”. This team did all the painting work over the school building. We were provided only purple and white color from the school. We were asked a night before from one of the teachers to paint Doraemon. We accepted this request rightaway. Once we finished our painting work, white color as a base color and decorated by a couple of purple Doraemon, we later realized that the teacher that made a request of painting Doraemon was not actually the teacher of this school!! The teacher that actually stays at the school, Kru Bua (Teach Bua), actually like Mickey Mouse!!! We then made our promise to her that if her school was selected to our KFAM project again, we will paint Mickey Mouse for her.
We did some changes on how we assign the Cooking Team, this was slightly different from what we did in the previous years. The change was due to there were few people lining for showering and we have a lot more Volunteer this year, this was then be the first year that we finished all the activities by 4 in the afternoon, then there were some people helping out in the kitchen and some taking a shower. We think that this way works really well. This made the responsibility for food not to be to any one person, but that to whoever was free, they can help cooking or preparing food.
There was another change we made this year, we reduced using a one-time used plastic cup. Last year, there were a huge number of wasted one-time used plastic cups that were used for kids and there were huge amount of trash after the activity. This year, we encouraged our Volunteer to bring their own reusable cup. This reduced greatly amount of the trash. This reflect a great result, we then planned to continue doing this next year. Also, for the next year activity, we have an idea of using Melamine Tableware or Stainless plate/dish to be used in our Big-Day activity and this will be in the list of a sponsor proposal. We believe that using such reusable tableware will help reducing the use of plastic or any non-recycled/ one-time used plate/dish for kids. Those Melamine Tablewares or stainless dishes can be cleaned after use and we can give away those dishes to the school for further use and there will be no plastic waste created after the activity. As you know, those plastic waste take million years to dispose.
On the 3rd day of the activity, this was our big day! Big play! And big gifts to give to all the kids according to our plan! This year there were 7 schools and 220kids as our beneficiaries. But this year the amount of the kids in the school was less than when we did the research. That’s why we also invited another 2 schools : Huai gai bpa and Jok pok school to bring the kids to join the activities. And the kids will get the gifts same as everyone. And the stuffs for these 2 schools we had 2 extra handyman tool sets gave them. Because sponsor gave us extra tool sets so it was perfect.
We were really excited about it since last night on the briefing time. We talked about the plan and schedule well. But turn our in the morning the kids from first school had arrived an hour earlier! Our activity team still had breakfast. So it was a bit of a chaos in the morning. Because we had to set up the place and speakers for the activity as soon as possible. Some the kids were panic a bit when they saw tall foreigners in our team. It’s the first time in their life to see foreigners and people who are this tall. But the kids from 3 schools that were here yesterday for the activities, they already used to us. They were smiling and happy to see the team again.
The communication problem that we found yesterday, today we had a solution. Luckily one of Special Force that volunteer with us could speak Karen hill tribe language. So the whole day he was a second language MC along with the team since morning. Problem solved!
In order to feed the kids from 9 schools + villagers + teachers + our team, in the kitchen they had to work very hard. It was the first time for them to have this kind of big event in this village. So it was so exciting for everybody too.
We set big team for the kitchen more than usual. And with all helps from teachers from 9schools, in the end we managed it. We were able to produce 300+ noodles for everybody.
We were thinking if the food is not enough for us, we will just let them eat. It was the first time for them to see big pieces of meat in a meal and this big portion. So for them it means a lot more. For us we can just eat something in the evening in one goal then. But in the end, food was enough for everybody. Actually maybe because we were also too tired to eat too. Or maybe it was because we had only 15 min break before we all had to get back to our station. We just had to try our best!
After lunch the kids prepared 5 sets of performance to show us, as a ‘thank you’ to us. We all would love to see. But most of us this is prime time to prepare another set up for the next program : giving every kids all the stuffs from sponsors. We had to do it as fast as possible. Because we know in order to give everything to the kids in this big amount it will take some time. We did not want the kids who had travelled from other village to travel back after sunset. On these kind of roads it will be too dangerous for them. Anyway, we finished giving stuffs for the kids, then we still have some stuffs to give to villagers too. This year we really received massive amount of second hand cloths. Thank you so much everybody. We had it more than enough to give to everyone and also shared to other 7 villages.
At night time, after this big day, we made a small party for KFAM team, teachers, military volunteers together to celebrate this big success. We were so relieved that everything went very very well.
On the last day after breakfast, our last assignment was ‘big cleaning’. We have to clean the school even cleaner than when we arrived. We had bother the school for many days. And now we had so many labors. So only an hour of work we can clean the school to the perfect condition. This morning one thing very strange was the kids in the village seem like they knew that we will head back today. So they came to school since early morning, helping us clean their school together. We think one of our mini goal of inspiring the kids was success. We could see this the result just after a couple of days we spend time with them.
Thank you very much to all sponsors from everywhere in the word, volunteers, Special Force that sent the team volunteer with us, every teachers from 9 schools, all villagers. KFAM projects this year wouldn’t be this success without your help. Thank you so much from our hearts.