Housing for Women leaving the Sex Industry

Greetings from Pattaya!

We hope that you are all doing well during this Covid-19 Pandemic. These are strange times and many things have changed. We are trying to adjust to the new realities as best as we can, but it is a challenge and we very thankful for faithful supporters like yourself that help us to continue our work even in the middle of this situation.

The situation in our City is bad. When in March the whole Entertainment Industry in Thailand was shut down, thousands of people lost their jobs. Here in Pattaya, the estimation is that more than 200.000 people, mostly women, lost their jobs, mostly women working in prostitution, food sellers, taxi drivers, Hotel staff, cleaning ladies, etc. The Thai government put an aid scheme on, but all the women that were working in the sex industry did not qualify as their jobs are illegal… But the women are used to live on the money that they made every night and suddenly the bars all closed, no customers where about, Tourist did not come anymore and then our City went into a lockdown as well. You can imagine the crisis that started. At Tamar Center we started directly in March with food aid – we concentrated on the women working in the sex industry and provided thousands of food bag – each bag containing enough food for about one week. Many women not only lost their jobs but also their housing, as they often lived on top of the bars where they worked. We helped several women to get back to their families before the lockdown and since than we have taken in 13 women, that are now taking part in our three-month long Tamar Vocational and Life Training. The women are very thankful, as they had no money anymore to pay for room rent and many in our city have become homeless.

Right now, we have all our housing full, we have a single bed free for one more woman that could come and join. We also used the time of the lockdown to move some houses. In our street some newly renovated houses became available and the landlords from some of our old houses refused to renovate. Because of that we decided to upgrade and have now two fully new renovated houses. The women that moved into them really enjoy them.

Thank you for helping us to continue to provide good housing for our women. Now they need it more than ever!

Links:

• Have a look at the products that our women make to earn a living