Housing for Women leaving the Sex Industry

Happy New Year to you all! Greetings from Tamar Center. We are very thankful for your continued support of our work and that you have chosen to support our Housing for Women project. Today we would like to update you a little bit about what has happened in the last three months.

In our last news update we wrote about our problem that all our beds were full – it was a good problem to have. We have decided against renting another house for the time being. One reason was that we had three people leaving our program and so we have again some free space. It is great when we see that people are moving on and are ready to return to a more “normal” life. One woman left to take care of her sister that had a stroke and is now living with her family in Bangkok, another woman left to start her own business in Bangkok – it is going well and we are purchasing things from her for Tamar Center as well, and a ladyboy left to move back in with his Family in the Issan region of Thailand.

There leaving also gave us the opportunity to move some of our women around, we were able to move some that have children into bigger rooms and we did some renovations, repairs and purchased some new furniture for some of the houses. This time we had to get a couple new fridges and stoves as the women have started to cook more at home. This is a very good sign, as they are taking their health more serious. Normally they would just buy all the food at street stalls, but we are teaching them to be more careful about quality of the food they eat, the amount of oil they use, sugar, etc.  We are happy to see that they take it serious.

We also installed a sun screen at the play area of our Nursery house. In the past the kids could not play outside in the mornings as the sun was too hot. Now with the cover they can play outside the whole day.

This week we also will do some more painting in the houses. Two houses just need to get painted but we also will add some small murals in some of the children rooms to make it nicer.

Thank you that through your help we can offer clean and safe places to women that need them. We are celebrating 20 years of Tamar Center in 2019 (in August) and are looking forward to welcoming many new women into our shelter this year!

Have a great year!

Daniel Vaupel