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Merry Christmas from everyone at Tamar to you all!

Last week we had a series of Christmas parties, which started with the Soi 6 Christmas Party, and earlier this week we enjoyed our big Christmas Outreach and distributed one thousand gifts bags in the bars of Pattaya and last night we celebrated our internal Christmas Party. Today we are slowly winding the year down and are getting ready for our break. Looking back, it has been a challenging year. We are thankful that our new building is, except of some small touches, finally finished! We are looking forward to re-open the Tamar Restaurant in January and to start the Palm Center (Counseling Center) and Tamar Hospitality in January with guests already booked from the middle of the month. We are grateful for many great outreaches and trainings that happened throughout the year, for a sizable number of women leaving the bars, moving into our houses, and starting vocational trainings but are also sad that some women left us this year. We are happy with Planin, who started a baking course at the Dusit Thani College this year and Jeab, who has just finished working with us and will start her own business in January very close to us. We are also grateful that our children successfully made the transition from online school back to normal school again and that all pandemic restrictions have been lifted.

We are also very grateful to you for your support and your help in this last year. You helped us keep going, you helped to finance many of our projects and distributions and your notes of encouragement have made us smile and brought new strength. We could have not done it without you! Thank you!

Peace is an important word this year. We wish for peace on earth, especially when we look towards the war in Ukraine. But not only in Ukraine, we wish for peace in our relationships with friends and family and now because of the pandemic, we wish for our peaceful life to be “back to normal.”  But do we find the peace that we are looking for? Unfortunately, we find it less and less. We hope that this Christmas season will be a time for all of us to reflect on the last year, to center ourselves and to gather strength for 2023 so that we will be able to have and bring peace to the world.

In this sense we wish you a peaceful and contemplative Christmas, carefree holidays, good health, and God’s blessings for the year 2023. We are deeply grateful for your help, support, and friendship for us here at Tamar Center!

For the Tamar Family

Hello everyone!

Greetings from Pattaya. We are happy to share some updates of our work with you:

In the last report we talked about our plans for the Mother’s Day Outreach. This outreach was an enormous success. Many women were touched that we acknowledged them as Mothers, they were happy about the gifts and a sizable number used their vouchers for a free Hair treatment at our Salon. There our staff was able to further build relationships with them. We learned that many of the women want to have a closer relationship with their children but often do not have money to sent gifts home. Therefore, we decided to include a DIY Card making gift set in our Christmas Bag distribution this year. This set, the women can either send complete home as a gift (it contains scissors, glue, and enough material for a lot of handicrafts), or they can use the set to make some special cards or gifts for their children. Right now, our team in the cardroom is preparing these packs and we will include them in our big Christmas distribution.

We also had the “Walk for Freedom” in Pattaya this year again and were able to participate with the whole Tamar Family. Our bakery was even tasked with making 250 snack packs for all the participants and it was an enjoyable experience for our women to join in the walk. Some of them, were working just a few weeks ago in the bars that we passed, and they were amazed about the change that they experienced in their lives. We hope that the walk helped to raise awareness in everyone that saw us walking. Big THANKS to A21 for organizing these walks all around the world.

Our Building is also coming along. We are close to the finish line but faced delays due to the current world situation – material was not available, others took a long time to get here, and we also had to deal with a shortage of skilled labor, due to the fact that workers had left Pattaya during Covid and did not return. Sadly, we are also facing extra costs of about 60000 USD through these issues and the raised prices for fuel/delivery costs. But you can see in the pictures that a lot of progress has been made and we are more than 90% done. We are still hoping to be able to open towards the end of this year and looking forward to welcoming you soon.

Thank you for your support of Tamar Center. We know that currently many people are facing hardships and we are even more grateful for your continued help and support so that the work here in Pattaya can continue!

For the Tamar Family