After 22 years in Mae Hee, a small town near Pai in Mae Hong Son province, Kwah Dao is planning to move to Chiang Mai. When our organization started, we provided schooling, vaccinations, and clean water to stateless children. Over the two following decades, we increasingly focused on providing scholarships for college. In fact, our …
After the survey among our students on adding a new program (the Chinese class) to our Youth Center curriculum in the previous month, we found that many of them were very interested in it and kept asking for the start of the class. Although there are some limitations and challenges we have to face, whether it’s the difficulty of finding an appropriate volunteer teacher to join our organization which is very hard during the Covid-19 pandemic, or the selection of the suitable with high standard Chinese textbooks among thousands of book where both good and poor contents are presented in the market. Or the obstacle of managing our little space to be fit for one more class as well as rescheduling the learning sessions not to be overlapping with other classes. Those obstacles may delay us for some time but can never stop us from bringing or providing better educational opportunities to our disenfranchised and vulnerable stateless students. As we are always aware that the future of our students is more important and cannot be delayed so we decided to start the Chinese class for them in late February without hesitation even though our readiness is not there. Fortunately, we are able to experience a satisfactory result after finishing the first week of teaching Chinese and we will continue working hard on it in order to provide the best result to the students.
On the occasion of Thai National Children’s Day, Kwah Dao Foundation has visited Shan communities, Pang Hin or Rock Village, and Kung Mok Kham, to inspect the livelihood of the villagers and donated consumer goods to impoverished families as well as donating school supplies to the children. Pang Hin is a small Shan community located along the Pai River. In the past, Pang Hin villagers were hired to collect rocks from the Pai River. Nowadays, they have turned to different occupations, whether it’s construction work, housekeeping, general laborer, or some of them are still hired to collect rocks in other places of Pai.
A lot of heat and flooding The rainy season is in full swing, at least in theory. In fact, rain remains a rarity this year. When it comes, it crashes over our little town in violent torrents, so that everything near the river is flooded. The flood damage along the Pai River has once again …
So you’re passing through Pai on your gap year in South-East-Asia and hear about Kwah Dao. You’ve always wanted to work with children, and volunteering to teach English would be a great idea. Wouldn’t it? Every year thousands of well-intentioned foreigners travel to Thailand to volunteer. A few days of volunteering has become as popular …
When we are born, we usually acquire a little piece of paper that says we now belong to a particular nationality: either the place in which we arrived in the world, or the one belonging to our parents.
Without this paper, you become what is known as ‘stateless’. A stateless person is someone who, under national laws, does not enjoy any kind of citizenship. There is no legal bond between a stateless individual and a government: regardless of the country they were born in or the country their parents were born in. They are stuck in limbo, gaining acceptance from neither here nor there.
Statelessness can occur for several reasons, including discrimination against particular ethnic or religious groups, or on the basis of gender; the emergence of new States and transfers of territory between existing States; and gaps in nationality laws.
Being stateless can have detrimental consequences on an individual, from the day their born until the day they die. They can be denied legal identity, access to education, healthcare, marriage and job opportunities. They can even be denied dignity in dying, with official burials and death certificates off-limits to them.
Many pass on the status of statelessness on to their children, who then pass it on to the next generation. The irony is that these people find themselves stateless through no fault of their own.
Why should I help?
Imagine being told that, because of where your grandparents, or even your great-grandparents were born, you’re not allowed to apply for a passport. Also, your leg is broken, but because of where your family was born you can’t use the hospital in the town you’ve lived in your entire life. No one in your family knows how to help because they were never allowed to pursue an education. Plus, even if you could visit the hospital, you can’t afford to pay the fees because no one in your family is allowed to work. On top of that, the country you still call home, despite the fact they won’t allow you a house, leaves you vulnerable to violence and other rights violations such as human trafficking.
Everyone — regardless of their legal status—has a right to fundamental conditions of human decency. Open society embraces the notion of human community, to which statelessness is antithetical. All persons have a right to participate in the communities where they live, and stateless persons are denied that right.
How can I help?
You can help educate disenfranchised youth and get something in return!
As we search for long term donors who can support our mission to improve communities through education, we need immediate help in order to keep our doors open.
Your donation here goes a long way. Our overhead cost is extremely low, so your money directly benefits disenfranchised communities in Northern Thailand.
Here is what you can receive as a thank you for your donation:
$10 – Picture from Kwah Dao’s Youth Center
$25 – Thank you letter written by our students + Picture from Kwah Dao’s Youth Center
$50 – Post Card made by local artist + Thank you video
$100 – Picture from Kwah Dao’s Youth Center Post Card made by local artist + Thank you video + Thank you letter written by our students
$250 – Small artwork print + Thank you video + Thank you letter written by our students
$500 – Big art work print + Thank you video + Thank you letter written by our students
$1000 – locally handmade hammock with extremely good quality + Thank you video + Thank you letter written by our students
$2500 – Three day retreat to Pai in Northern Thailand, with the opportunity to see Kwah Dao in action (flights not included)
$2500 – Teakwood wall art + Thank you video + Thank you letter written by our students
$5000 – Original Artwork + Hammock + Teakwood mural + Thank you video + Thank you letter written by our students
$5000 – Weeklong retreat to Pai in Northern Thailand, with the opportunity to see Kwah Dao in action (flights not included)
Make your donation monthly and make a larger impact! Check out our website and become a monthly donor. We are in desperate need of having a more stable monthly income, and even small monthly donations would help the long term sustainability of this project! It is as easy as one push of a button through our PayPal.
We also really appreciate donations of time. If you are interested in being a volunteer EFL Teacher, and can commit to a minimum of 12 weeks, read about our current opportunities here.
We currently have multiple volunteering positions available with Kwah Dao. We are hoping to fill these openings with inspiring, driven and creative thinkers, who will share our vision for an empowered world of equal opportunities. There are two roles we need help with as soon as possible: EFL Teacher/ Activities Leader Position: Voluntary Duration: 12-week …
