Help Sexworkers in Thailand find a new life!

Happy New Year 2019!!! From Tamar Center we would like to wish you a very good and blessed 2019. We have that it will be a great year for you and wanted to let you know that we are very thankful for all your support in the last year.

2018 has been a very busy year for us, but it was also a good year. Many women have left the bars behind and joined Tamar Center, we had a couple of women leave our ministry to start their own businesses and to reunite with their Families and during the Christmas time we could reach out to many women are still currently trapped in the bars.

All of this would have not been possible without your help and support. Thank you!

We are looking forward to a great 2019 - we will celebrate 20 Years of Tamar Center in August and have many things planned for that.

But for now, just enjoy some pictures from our Christmas activities!

Daniel

Hello everybody!

Thank you very much for your support of Tamar Center. It means a lot to us that you are helping us to fulfill our job. A lot of things have happened since the last update, so here we go:

-          Nong finished her sewing training. She created a lot of our scarfs and bags and earlier in the year she expressed an interest to learn how to make trousers, shirts and baby clothing. We looked around, found a sewing school in Pattaya and sent her there. Her sewing skills improved a lot and we also bought a new machine for her where she can do some special stiches with. Maybe we will start offering some baby clothing in the future…

-          Yaa also finished an English course at a local school. Her dream is to work as a translator in the future. Her spoken English is already very good, but she lacked skills in reading and writing. We sent her to the school and they concentrated with her on this. Now is much better and is thinking about doing another course.

-          In October we had the problem that all our accommodation for women was full. We got several new girls from the bars and for the first time that I can remember all our beds were in use. A good problem to have!

-          At the end of October one of our women left to start a small business in Bangkok. She did well in our training, is stable and we are very happy that she was able to move on. We are seeing her posts on Facebook now, where she is promoting her products. She is selling clothing and is doing some handicraft as well.

-          Sadly, we also had to ask one woman to leave. She was with us for several months but than we found out that she brought drugs into our houses and offered them to the other women. There were some other issues as well and so we had to sit her down and ask her to leave. Sadly, she is back in the bars now and working as a prostitute again.

-          Two weeks ago, we were also able to reunite one of our women with her son, whom she had not seen for about 5 years. The son is in an orphanage in Pattaya and over the last months the woman had expressed a desire to meet him again. And so, it worked out and the two of them spend one very emotional evening together. We are now working with the orphanage to see if we can completely re-unite them, but we first must make sure that that is the best for both and that they are ready for this as well. But it was a good first step.

-          Our English Classes in Soi 6 have been going very well, with many women attending on a regular basis. Our teachers are very creative and are building a nice community there. This Thanks Giving they all cooked together as part of their class and shared a Turkey meal together.

As you can see, there are lots of things going on. One other project that we are working on is upgrading our Nursery. The children that we are looking after are getting older and we need to replace some of the toys and get some other things. For this purpose, we have set up an End of the Year Fundraiser for this. Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday and all donations here on Global Giving will be matched up to 150.000 USD. Please have a look at our page and we would be happy if you could consider helping us out:

https://www.globalgiving.org/microprojects/tamar-christmas-project-2018-nursery-upgrade/

So much for today, I wish you a great day and thank you again for all your support for Tamar Center!

Links:

• End of Year Fundraiser for Tamar Nursery

Greetings from Thailand to you all!

It is time for another update from us at Tamar Center. The last months have been filled with many exciting things. Here is a short summary of some of the things that happened:

On Friday the 10^th of August we celebrated the Graduation from this year’s Tamar Vocational and Life Training. Six women left prostitution behind and joined the training that started on the 18^th of May and we are happy to report that all six of them have graduated! This is the first time in seven years that everybody that started also finished the training! And not only that – all six of them are doing very well and all of them have asked if they could stay on with us. We have employed them all in our different businesses and for now they are all helping with a big order of 3000 Christmas Cards but next week one of them will start in our Restaurant, one other will do some special sewing projects and two of them will receive further training in Hairdressing.

During the training they learned not only about these jobs but also learned how to deal with finances, how deal with family and many other things. They all received counseling and we have seen them grow a lot in the last weeks. Some of them were very shy in the beginning, others suffered still from what they experienced while they worked in prostitution but now we see that they are on a good way forward. One of the women even went home last weekend and brought her young daughter to stay with her at Tamar. That was not possible while she worked in the bars and she missed her daughter so much. It is nice to see them now together.

Another update is from a woman that is already a couple of years with us. In August during the Thai Mother’s Day (Mother Day in Thailand is the Birthday of the Queen), she got the Mother of the Year Award from her school, which is a big thing here. You cannot believe how proud she was to receive this award. Her young daughter was also selected to be the conductor for the yearly school parade. Hope you can see on the picture how happy she was.

Shekinah from the USA also arrived in the last month. She is an English Teacher by profession and has come for one year to work with us and teach English to the women that are still working in the bars. We are very glad that she is here as she lifts the standard of our English Classes to a more professional level. She started to do individual assessments with all the women to the classes to see at which level they are so that she can teach them accordingly.

On the sad side we had to say to Alinda and Rik with there two children. They volunteered with us for the last five years but returned now to the Netherlands. We are very thankful for all the help that they have been but also sad that they left. We wish them a great start back home!

Good, so much for a short update from Tamar. Have a wonderful day and thank you for your continued support of the work that we are doing here in Pattaya.

With gratitude!

Links:

• Here you can see what our women are producing and you can order!

Hello!

Greetings from Thailand. It is time for a short update again. In the middle of May, the 20^th (!) Tamar Vocational and Life Training has started. It was an amazing celebration to see six women leave the bars behind, move to Tamar and start the training program. So far, the Training is going very well and the women all enjoy it. We especially thankful for the teachers that are doing the practical teaching this year: We have one lady who came all the way from the Netherlands to teach hairdressing and we are also very grateful that an old student from us has returned. She left Tamar Center many years ago and runs now a successful restaurant and bakery in her home town and now she is back to teach baking skills to our women. We are also very thankful that one of our current women that finished her training two years ago as continued learning sewing and, in this year’s, training is able and willing to teach the new women sewing. We are looking forward to see what will happen in the lives of the women and we hope that they will change their life’s forever.

Before the training started we had many special outreaches to the bars and also some big parties where we invited big groups of women from the bars and showed them what we could offer them. In the beginning many more women signed up for our training but than in the last week many sadly cancelled. We hope that some of them will return in the future.

Right now, everything in Tamar is focusing on the training of the new women. The training will continue until the end of August and we are looking forward to seeing the women transformed.

In the cardroom it is now already the time to think about Christmas – yes you read right. In Tamar Center our women are producing many Christmas cards for companies and so it is now time to review the latest designs and to start working on some of the bigger orders. If you are interested in big amounts of Christmas cards for your company or circle of friends, please let us know.

Good, so much for the update. Please enjoy the attached pictures of the start of the training!

Daniel Vaupel

Links:

• Need Christmas Cards?

Greetings from Thailand to you all!

Big thank you for your continued support of the work that is happening here in Thailand. In the last months we have been very busy and I just want to give you a short update about all the different things:

-        In January we renovated our Restaurant and started to offer Pizza, Tacos and vegetarian Burgers for sale. This has really helped our restaurant and has given us much more options to train our women in cooking and preparing food

-        On Valentine’s Day we did a special Outreach into the Bar Areas of Pattaya to encourage the women and to invite them for a party to our center. The party was a big success with many women attending and we offered all of them help to leave the bars and to start a new life

-        Some of the women attended than our Mini-Training – a one-week long training program where they can see what Tamar Center is offering to them. They got some basic training in sewing, cooking and hair cutting.

-        In English Class we have also more women attending and we updated our lesson plan and got more creative – as you can see in the pictures – they were learning shapes and colors

-        Otherwise our normal programs are still going on but a bit slower as right now we have the school holidays in Thailand and a number of the women are helping out in our Nursery to look after all the kids

-        In May we are planning our next three-month long vocational and life training and are hoping for 12 women from the bars to attend. We will have special outreaches and more parties happing in April and May to invite many of the girls.

So, much for a short update today. Thank you for your help – without you, we could not do the work here!