Helping Children from Ex-Sex workers in Thailand

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 our children transition from online school back to normal school, you helped us to run our Nursery and to purchase new toys and equipment as well as paying the salaries of the teachers there and you helped us going on several fun outings. Our mothers are also very grateful to you for the monthly support that they receive. As you know, we pay half of the monthly support out in the cash and the other half we safe in the name of the child and the mothers can use it for purchasing school uniforms and other supplies that they need. After two years without any school, all the children needed new uniforms and shoes and so the saving were an immense help to provide everything that the kids needed. 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

Hallo and greetings from Thailand!

We are enjoying the school holidays here and our Nursery Staff is very busy looking after the currently fifteen(!) children that we have at Tamar right now. They keep them busy – from 1 year to 13 years old – you can imagine there is always a lot going on. But not matter the age – all the kids enjoyed a trip that we did on the 20^th of October to visit the Monster Aquarium and Zoo in Pattaya. You can see in the pictures, the kids and the Staff enjoyed the snakes, fishes, and other animals. It only seems that some of the kids were a little bit afraid of the baby goats Anyway, it was a wonderful day out and when we returned to Tamar Nursery, we got ice-creams for everyone to round up the day.

Now the children have a final week of holidays and then it is back to school for them, and the nursery will again be a lot quieter – in the moment we only have three kids that are not in school yet. But if everything works out there, we might get another 5 months old baby in the next week. The mother is a 17-year-old girl that worked in the bars here in Pattaya and is thinking about coming with the baby to us at Tamar – we hope that it works out and that the two of them are willing to leave the life in the bars behind and come out.

Thank you for your continued support of the children at Tamar. Without your help we could not take the kids on these outings and could not just take mothers with newborn children in and provide for the babies. Your generosity makes it possible! Thank you!

The Tamar Family

Greetings from Thailand and the especially from all the children here at Tamar Center. We are very glad that schools have finally re-opened to in person learning and after almost two years the children are able to go back to school! They really enjoy seeing their friends again and play with other kids. Yes, after the first days, the excitement went away and some wanted to stay home again, but that is normal. Now, that everyone has adjusted they mostly enjoy it.

The school year started on the 16^th of May and during the week before that we had a special treat for the children: a sports week, thanks to two Volunteers who came from the UK. Together with the Tamar team they offered a daily program that everyone just loved: Hockey, Wall Climbing, Games, Elefant Camp and many more activities were on the program and at night the children fell into bed – which also made the Mum’s happy.

When the week finished, we celebrated the volunteers with a special barbecue and again the kids enjoyed it but had too much of the cake as you can see in the pictures!

Thanks to your support all the mom’s where able to purchase new school uniforms and all materials that were needed for school again. After almost two years of not going to school, the children had outgrown their uniforms and shoes. Without the support from you through Tamar Center, many of the mom’s would not have been able to pay all these extra costs. But now the kids are happy and proud of their new uniforms!!!

Thanks again for all your help and support of the children at Tamar Center.

For the Tamar Family

Greetings from Tamar Center in Pattaya! We hope that you are doing well. Thank you for your continued support of the work that we are doing here in Pattaya.

We have for now finished the “Tamar School” as we currently have school holidays. The school year ended in the middle of March and the new school year will start around the 16^th of May. We really hope that it will be in in person learning again. After two years of almost complete online school the children need normal school again: they need to see their friends, play with them, and interact with others in class. In the last months it has been very difficult with the online school. It seemed that the teachers had lost motivation or where out of ideas and the kids did not really concentrate much anymore. We tried our best to keep them motivated, helped with extra classes in math and English taught by Volunteers but it was still hard. Currently it is not decided yet if classes in person will resume in May, but we really hope so.

Our younger children are growing up fast. We have started to do regular reading classes with them in our nursery and they love the time of sitting down and going through books. It was something new to them and some mothers are also catching up to it and reading at home as well.

We have one new child with us as well. He used to stay in the village with his grandparents but sadly in school he had some bad friends and started using drugs, at the age of eleven! When his mother found out she decided to bring him to Pattaya to stay with her. He adopted well to life in the big city - it is very different from the small village. His school grades are concerning but we are giving him extra lessons and hope that after the school holiday he will have a good start in his new school.

The children also love to play with the toys that they received through a donation from a local school. It is nice to see them all active, playing and having a carefree life! Thank you that you are helping to provide this for them!

For the Tamar Family

Merry Christmas to everyone!

The Team from Tamar Center would like to wish you all Happy Holidays and a blessed new Year 2022! We are very thankful to you for your support and help throughout this year. Your gifts have made it possible for us to continue our outreaches and help to the bargirls in Pattaya. But let’s have a short look back on the year: 2021 was different from what we hoped and expected, and we all experienced many challenges throughout the year. It does not matter where in the world you where located, there have been many difficulties for us all. Sadly, it looks like, that at least the start of 2022 will be similar.

But in the last year, also many good things have happened, and I want to briefly highlight them from our work to you:

-          Purchase of the new Tamar Building – as of writing this Christmas news the new Building is 93% funded – which is just amazing

-          Tamar School – Since the start of online school in Thailand in June, we have set one of our buildings aside and everyday one staff member assists the Tamar children with their online schooling, logging on to the different classes, helping with worksheets, etc. This really helped the mothers out, as many of them struggled with the schoolwork of their children

- As many of the children at Tamar are struggling with the long lockdown and with no school for almost 10 months this year, we have added some counseling sessions for the kids and are helping them to deal with the situation. We hope that in 2022 schools can finally re-open for all children.

-          Throughout the year, we continued our food distribution. From May onwards, we were not allowed to distribute to groups and so had to make one on one appointments with the women. In that way, we distributed around 100.000 meals in this year alone

-          Our vocational training was very limited due to the lockdowns and restrictions, but we still were able to train new women for our bakery and were able to keep all the women in our program.

-          Our counseling program was able to go much deeper with the women that are staying with us than they would have been able to normally. Due to the lockdowns, curfews, etc., there was a lot more time for the individual women to deal with deeper traumas from their past.

-          We were also able to do some renovation work in the buildings where our women are staying and also in our Outreach Center in Soi 6 where we replaced all the windows and painted again, ready for more outreaches in the new year.

As you can see, even though it was a challenging year, there have been many good things that have come out of it.  As this year draws to a close, we would like to challenge you to take some time out and reflect on all the good things that happened in 2021. We did that with our team here in Thailand and we were amazed by the extensive list of positive things that happened.

And so, we want to finish this year with wishing you a contemplative Christmas, nice holidays, good health, and rich blessings for the year 2022. We are very grateful here at Tamar for your help and support.

Merry Christmas!

For the Tamar Family