Housing for Women leaving the Sex Industry

Hello everyone!

Time for another update from us at Tamar Center. In July and August, we were able to take three new women into Tamar Center, all three of them very young (17, 18 and 21 years old). Thanks to your support we had nice rooms waiting for them so that they can make them into a cozy new home. Some of the cases are challenging but currently all of them are doing well and making good progress.

We have also started the process to replace all the mattresses that we have in the houses for the women. They are already a couple of years old, and we want the women to have the best night sleep that is possible. You will also see attached two pics from the play area for children in our houses and from an outing that we did with the Tamar children to the new local Dino Park.

The other news is that we are currently upgrading our Drop-in Center in Soi 6. We are changing the complete electric wiring, replacing old aircon units with environmentally friendly inverter machines, giving it a fresh coat of paint and are also building a sleeping room for women from the bars. Currently we have daily women come to sleep at our place and we want them to have a save place. They are sleeping right now on a sofa behind the Hair Salon (see pics below) , but we would like to have a room ready for them to give them some privacy and for them to rest properly.

In the next months we will also roll out more counseling services in our Drop-in Center to engage the women more and show them different options of vocational training and employment. We still have some space in our housing and hope to fill that soon with new women from the bars that would like to change their lives.

Thank you for helping us and being a blessing to the women on the lookout for a safe place to stay!

The Tamar Family

Hello everyone!

Thank you very much for your continued support of the Tamar housing project. In the last three months we had no new women joining but we got some new children joining their moms in our housing.

For one of our women who comes from a small island her son had to be enrolled in school. From the island that was not possible or would involve a lot of travel time each day and would not be possible during rainy season at all and so she decided to bring him to Pattaya after the break at Songkran in April. He is now with her in our houses and is adjusting well to being in the big City. Not easy when you come from a very rural place and suddenly you move to the city, you are used to being looked after by your grandma and suddenly your Mum is back and takes care of you and you start school as well with many new children around you. But we are still very happy that he moved to Pattaya and now has time to bond with his mother, it will be good for his development, and we are very happy that we are able to offer good accommodation for him through your sponsorship.

July is the last month of this year’s five-month long Tamar Vocational and Life Training and we are very busy with this. The women taking part in this Training have learned soo much and have progressed well. For our Staff it was a huge challenge, first doing a training after Covid again and then doing a much longer training than our normal three-month long one. It has been worth it but because of it we have done some fewer outreaches than normal and therefore did not take in any new women. Once the training is finished at the end of July, we will talk with the women graduating about their next steps and will do some big outreaches to bring in more women. We are planning a big Outreach for the 12^th of August, Mother’s Day – Queens Birthday, and hope to connect with many new women there to fill up our Center again.

Thank you for your help and support. Our women are very grateful for the good accommodation that they have and enjoy the quiet, restful space.

For the Tamar Family

It is time for another update from us at Tamar Center. Thank you for supporting the housing project for our women. Now, that the Covid pandemic is mostly behind us, we did some deep cleaning in all of our houses and made them ready to receive new women. We started the 23^rd Tamar Vocational and Life Training on the 26^th of February. This training will run for five months until the end of July.

For this training, seven women left the bars in Pattaya behind to start a new life and all seven of them moved into the housing, that you help to provide for the women. In the week before the Training started, we got four new women that moved in and it got very busy. We are very thankful that we have these houses where the women have a safe place to stay and from where they can start to rebuilt their lives.

Most of the women that joined for this year’s training program came alone but some of them are planning to bring their children with them, after the Songkran holiday that will happen in the middle of April this year. One of the women, has two small children that her mother is looking after right now, but the they stay in a very remote area of Thailand without good access to schools and so the Mother decided to enroll her 5 year old son in a school in Pattaya and she will bring him and her other, 1 year old son with her after the break. We have already talked to the school and they are reserving a place for him, as applications have to be made in person and our nursery will look after her other child when it comes.

As you can see, there is always a coming and going and our rooms are getting used a bit. We also had a couple of women that came in the last months but also left again. Some where not ready to leave the bars behind, some had drug problems, and some got a lot of pressure from their families to continue in the bars and to sent big amounts of money home. We try to give each women a nice home, away from home and are grateful to have now seven new women staying with us for the training.

Thank you for making these homes possible. Through your help we always have rooms available so that women can move in within the hour of them contacting us. Thank you for your continued generosity!

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 us keep going, you helped us to continue to offer housing to women and children in need. You helped us to give out many welcome packs with hygiene articles and bedding to the new women coming and we were also through your generosity able to upgrade several of the houses that we rent and to purchase new furniture and appliances. 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

Greetings from Thailand. Here the rainy season is finally ending and as you are going into autumn, wintertime, we are entering the nice season here. The women working in the bars will also be happy that they rain is finally over. You might wonder why I am writing about this today and the reason is that today I want to update you about a different form of accommodation that we had to start to provide.

The way the bar system here works is that the customers take the women home for the night and not just for an hour or so. But still very often when they are done with the women the men do not want them to stay around and so they sent them home. The women live in very cramped conditions above the bars where they work. We started to notice when we came to work at 08.00 am to our Outreach center that several women were sitting outside their bars and trying to sleep in the rain. They were getting wet and were cold. We asked why they would not go inside, and they told us that the bar owners lock the doors when the bar closes for the night and if they are out, they must wait until the bar opens at around lunchtime to get to their room….

Can you imagine? After a night spent with often not the nicest customers, these women come “home” and must sit outside a closed bar for many hours in the rain, before the door opens and they can finally get to their bed?

Our team started to open our Outreach Center for these women and on some days, we had up to five women sleeping on our couches and our chairs. These women were very thankful that we were able to be out of the rain and dry and comfortable. We have been doing this throughout this rainy season and it is an effective way of building more relationships with the women.

In the second week of November, we are starting a weeklong Hairdressing Training and hope for ten women from the bars to come and join. They can just come for the week, get the training and if they decide that they like it, they can move to us, into the housings that you help to provide and start to enroll in our full vocational training.

Thank you for your faithful support. Only with your help can we continue to offer shelter to the women coming out of the bars.