Helping Children from Ex-Sex workers in Thailand

Today we would like to update you about the Tamar children and some of the things that they have been up to in the last couple of months. Currently, all the children are enjoying their big school holidays and the new school year will start in early May. The exams in the middle of March were a tense time for them, but lots of extra work required, but they managed them.

Before the exam season of the school year started, we took all the children and their mother’s to a very special outing: We visited the Ramayana Waterpark – the largest waterpark in Thailand – with everyone and spent a whole day, from the moment it opened until the moment it closed in the park. The kids and also the mother’s had an absolute blast and we must say that the park is very well designed with great play areas and slides for all the different age groups. You can see in the pictures below how much everyone enjoyed the day! Another sign of their enjoyment was, that on the way back it only took 2 or 3 driving before all the kids where in deep sleep.

During the school holidays the kids also enjoyed some special times with their mother’s. We used some of the donations and made money available for each mother to spend quality time with her child. The only rule was, that they need to do something together as Mother and child. Some decided to go to the aquarium in town, others decided to make another visit to a waterpark and some went to the trampoline park. It was nice to see the mother’s taking the initiative and arrange some outings for their children.

Now that the school holidays are slowly coming to an end the mother’s are especially grateful for your support, as it is now the time of the year where new school uniforms and school material need to be purchased. At Tamar we safe each month some money for each child and so when these bigger expenses come up once per year, the women can bring us the receipts for the different items and we reimburse them from the money that was saved.

Thank you for your continued support of the Tamar children – you are making a huge difference in their life’s!

For the Tamar Family

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