Helping Children from Ex-Sex workers in Thailand

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

Greetings from Thailand to you all!

Thank you for your continued support of the children at Tamar Center. This week we looked at pictures from last year and were amazed how much the children have grown, some of them are becoming already teenagers. It is amazing to see them grow and develop. Sadly, the last couple of months have been difficult for them. Schools in Thailand are closed since March of this year. The schools started to do online schooling but with no nationwide system in place it has been not the best experience for the children, as it was left up to the individual teacher to develop their systems. Some decided to do some online teaching, some only give daily worksheets for the children, some ask them to watch YouTube videos or record lessons and load them up and most of them make a combination of all the above. You can imagine that it is very difficult for the mothers to motivate their children to sit the entire day in front of a mobile phone to follow school by themselves, especially as the mothers must go to work.

We saw the problems that this caused to our women and decided to start the “Tamar School”. Basically, we turned one of our houses into a school and assigned some of our Staff Members to look after the children during the day, help them to sign into their individual classes, explain the worksheets to them and much more. We added every morning an hour of outside play in our street. We did it early to follow the Covid-19 restrictions and to keep our children separate from others. After the exercise, the children start their schoolwork – we have children in eight different schools and grades and so every child is different and has a different schedule. We also added some fun activities at the end of each day to make it a bit more fun for the kids, we tried to do English lessons, some baking, some crafts, etc.

Overall, this has been a success and the mothers are especially happy that when they finish work, they only must check the daily homework of the children and not sit down with them to do it all. Only the Staff that is with the children every day is very exhausted at the end of the day. But we change them every day around and have others come in to help with some activities and so it works well.

There is hope that from November onwards children will be aloud to go back to school but that is not final yet. It all depends on number of vaccinations and if the schools can get themselves ready. Our hope is that the children can soon go back to school, as this sitting and learning on their phones is just not good!

Thank you for your continued support, it makes a stark difference and help us to support the children and their mothers in the best conceivable way during this crisis.

Greetings from Tamar Center!

How are you all doing? I hope that in your part of the world things are starting to look up and that restrictions are getting lifted. Sadly, here in Thailand this is not the case yet – and especially our children are the once that have to suffer the most. They do not like to be at home for most of the days and miss their friends from school.

From the middle of April until the end of May we had very strict shutdown rules and had to work from home with all schools closed. Officially the new school year should have started in mid-May but that was postponed to the 14^th of June. When the 14^th of June came around, all the schools in Pattaya and all Provinces in Thailand with big number of Covid-19 cases were told that they were not allowed to open and currently it does not look likely that anything will change before of the end of July. The schools were ordered to create work sheets for the children to fill out at home, some online lessons, online teaching videos for the children to watch, etc.

Our women have children in eight different schools and guess what, all these schools have a different program that they follow. After just a couple of days it became clear that for our mothers it was impossible to work and then help their children with the schoolwork’s. Some also did not internet on their phones, needed their phones and could not leave them with their children etc.

As a Tamar Leadership Team, we decided that in order to halfway function we had to step in and help. We now have the children come to work with their mothers in the morning and we have set one room aside, where the school aged children spent the day working on their school assignments. We also have assigned one Staff Member to look after the children, help them with logging in when there is an online class, explain to them their work sheets and to start and finish the day with some games and group activities – a little bit like normal school. This setup is far from ideal, but the kids seem to enjoy it and the mothers can actually come to work. We still hope that schools can open soon!

Due to the new school year starting the mothers also had to spend a lot of money for new school uniforms and the needed books for their children. Thanks to your donations we are saving for each child that is at Tamar every month money for these expenses. The Mothers this year are especially happy that we have the money ready for them, as due to Covid, they and the families in the countryside are very short on money. In the last days they all came, checked how much money they had saved, went shopping and brought us the bills. All of them had enough money saved to cover all the costs for their children. Thank you for providing the funds for our children fund!!!

During the time that we were in shutdown and had to stay home, we did a lot of renovation work in our houses, and you can see a nice pic here as well from the kids wanting to help!

Thank you for your continued support for the children here in Pattaya!

For the Tamar Family