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Our Mission -- Provide a Home and Education
Thai Government School in our Local Village
 Seven
of our children attend the Baan Daada School about 100 meters away
from our shelter in the local village. Located near the Moei
River, the school serves between 300-400 students, most if not all who
are from Myanmar and living in the local vicinity. The children
study in Thai although most of the school's
students are Burmese. The
school has comfortable classrooms and has just built a new wing along
the length of the playground where local youth gather to play football.
We hope to invite children from this school to try their hand at
being farmers. We want to provide them each with an individual
plot of farm land -- or raised bed of soil and compost -- to experiment on. Plans include teaching them
the techniques of natural farming and allowing them to try growing crops
without chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, tillage, or
other artificial styles of agriculture.
 Our
children have been attending Baan Daada since last year when the school
was in danger of closing because it didn't have enough students.
Since then, the school's admission has closed because there are
too many students. The village continues to grow with more
Burmese moving into the area after the recent cyclone. The house
next to our shelter now supports a small garment factory. We can
look over our fence into the factory and watch the workers sewing away.
This year, on Mother's Day, Ita visited Baan Daada and was there
to play her role as a 'mother', receiving the offerings of students and
blessing the children. Zagle, one of or children who only
enrolled this year, is pictured here with his teacher. He had
received a prize for one of his drawings. I can remember last
year when he was only learning to write the English alphabet.
Now, his copy book also contains the Thai alphabet. By the
time he is much older, I am confident he will be at least bilingual and
possibly trilingual.
Our Kindergarten, Home Tutoring and Bible Classes
 Although
about half of our fifteen children staying at the shelter attend the
village school, the other half are too young for primary school
studies. Additionally, the local village has no facilities for studies
at the kindergarten level. I have six years experience as a
kindergarten teacher -- in the U.S., Korea, India, Nepal and China --
and helped found schools and their curriculums during the ten years I
lived in Nepal. I feel confident that I can design an appropriate
kindergarten curriculum for our younger children -- one that will
prepare them for future studies in the village school.
Considering the success story of the Montessori schools in educating
supposedly mentally handicapped children in Italy I am inspired by the
basic techniques of this method of schooling. I have also posted
background readings in educational philosophy as it was espoused by
Krishnamurti on the Education page of this website. He best
expresses the 'spirit' of our mission in support of our shelter's
children's growth into adult human beings. Ita and Goin, the
Christian couple who have given so much of themselves to the children
-- providing them with a loving and caring model of healthy parents
when so many of the children are from dysfunctional families or have
lost parents -- also conduct bible classes on weekends. Our
children enjoy these classes and performing songs and hymns. They are
learning about the larger family of humanity and its spiritual values.
We hope they realize that social skills and networking with other
children to develop new sibling bonding into an enlarged sense of
family will help them survive in Thailand or Burma in the future --
wherever their life leads them. Ita and Goin have also opened
our shelter to additional Burmese children living in our village --
about a dozen. These are children whose parents are too poor to
meet the costs of enrolling their children into the village school.
They neither can afford school uniforms nor books and supplies,
so they have turned to us for basic education for their children.
We provide tutoring in Burmese and English during weekday
afternoons. On the weekends, we also furnish them with a hot
meal. We expect other children from the village will join them
once the kindergarten project is complete. If you'd like to help
out in the kindergarten, with bible classes, or as an English tutor,
let us know in advance of your visit.
Burmese Kindergarten Construction Project Overview (possibly winter 2008 or spring 2009)
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HTF Home School