Orphanage | Travel and Life in Thailand

To celebrate New Years Eve we decided to treat the children of Stratton House to a evening out at the Chiang Mai Cold Season Festival held at the grounds of City Hall.

This a huge event, very popular with the locals, with hundreds of stalls where you can find food, clothes, toys, etc.

There are also many ‘fairground rides’ , as well as several stages with live music acts.

Our children had a great time looking around this fantastic spectacle.

They had all received a little pocket money to be able to buy snacks or drinks and then we allowed them to choose a few fairground attractions to enjoy. They all did very well, considering the vast variety of stalls and tempting things, in not asking for too much.

During their time there they enjoyed rides on a merry go round and a ‘Big’ Wheel, and spent time in the Bouncy Castle and House of Horrors.

Tai and Dtu, the older boys tried their hand at bursting balloons with darts and Dtu managed to win himself a cuddly Panda, which he gave to his sister, May, who has also joined us at Stratton House.

The most popular event of the evening seemed to be a snake show we came across by chance.

Tucked away behing the food stalls young Jack noticed the snakes being prepared and pulled us towards the show.

I’m not quite sure ow I felt about watching the first section of the show which involved a boy, of about 12, baiting a very large snake, which I believe was a Python. The snakes very large fangs could done some nasty damage had the boy made a mistake.

Later in the show and older guy performed with a large Cobra, sometimes appearing to hypnotise it and other times outright baiting it to attack.

Certainly not something I want the kids to try at home!

10th Nov

Sometimes it just needs a little prompt of a helpful friend and solutions to your problems are found. having no home phone line, I have been wrestling with the problem of how to keep my website properly updated on a daily basis.
ally Today,( thursday-10th dec), I went for lunch with my friend Ally and then onto a wireless cafe where Ally kindly gave me first instructions on how to operate the on line shop that she has set up for my Foundation website.
During our discussions she also came up with the perfect solution for my updating.
And as in most cases it is such a simple solution that I kick myself for not thinking of it.
Using word pad, I will from now on attempt to get back to daily blog entries. It will mean that the blog will tend to be back-dated; the plan being to do them live at home, save and then copy , paste and add photos on the occasions when I get into the internet shop. Happy days:)
draw (Custom) The children at Stratton House have been home all day as schools are closed for the next 4 days; not sure why except that today is apparently Democracy Day. They have been kept busy with yet more art classes from Boon.
They have been as excited as me about the online shop and keen to do their bit to produce products for the shop that will hopefully raise funds for The Stratton ABC Foundation to fulfil its mission.

This post is a little belated, but its been a busy week with no new phonelines on the horizon for Mae Salab:(.

1 (Custom) December 5th is Fathers Day in Thailand, being, as it is, The Kings Birthday. In tribute to The King, at the start of his 82nd year,the Chiang Mai Royal Flora Exhibition opened its gates for free for a period of 10 days from the beginning of the month.

Keen to afford the children at Stratton House as many opportunities to be involved with local culture and celebrations as possible we decided to take them to the Exhibition site on Saturday the 5th in order to join in paying respect and sending best wishes to His Majesty, The King.

The King has not been in the best of health of late; he actually left his Hospital bed in order to be able to address his people on this important day. Doing so he made a very welcome call for unity amongst the Thai population. He stated that his health and prosperity would be assured if his people could settle their differences and return the country to stability. Lets hope his words are heeded.

It was decreed some years ago that the colour Pink was an auspicious colour for ensuring the health and welfare of The King and there has been an apparent surge in the purchase of pink shirts of late as His majesty struggles with his health.

We left Stratton House at around 6pm, knowing that the fireworks display should start at around 8-8.30pm. There have apparently been fireworks every night and my friend Ally is fortunate enough to live close enough to view from her balcony at home. Maybe we should have asked to go there.

We hit the traffic queue for the event shortly after turning left of Hang Dong Road. And there we sat for quite sometime, inching forward, caught between wanting to open the windows to get some air and wanting to close them to keep out the stench of exhaust fumes threatening to choke us as we waited.

After what seemed like forever we eventually reached the traffic lights on the Canal Road, only to see the traffic being forced left to U turn into a virtually static queue. Celebration or not I had had enough, boiling up in a car full of aggitated kids frustrated at being cooped up. The only clear road was the right turn onto the Canal Road heading into Chiang Mai City , so that’s the way we took. I hadn’t given up totally. Meaning to find a spot to park up where we could still at least view the pyrotechnics I suddenly remembered the back roads that lead off the Canal Road round to the back of the Royal Flora and up to Wat Doi Kam; where I used to look out for the dogs when volunteering for Care For Dogs. Within a few minutes we were parked up near the side entrance to the exhibition.

2 (Custom) The Royal flora is an impressive and beautifully landscaped and manicured site and on this night was host to thousands, filling every available viewing spot. There is a wonderful Temple building to the rear of the site and it was to the Temple ‘grounds’ that we headed. By this time the firework display had already begun and the skies were also filling with paper lanterns. It had been worth the hassle to get there. The children sat and watched the display for a while but soon bored of it when spotting the animal statues in one of the many garden areas. Once the display had finished we wandered around the site that I can imagine would be a wonderfully relaxing place to be when not so packed with partying folk.

There were rumours that it will eventually be turned into a public park…I hope so and look forward to it.

We can only hope that there is as bigger surge to address the realities of Thailands present problems.

kingtalit We hope you enjoyed your day your Majesty; Long Live The King.

More photos(fullsize) please visit our photobucket album here.

Its that time of year again, and although I’ve always been a bit of a Christmas humbug, not being a Christian, and being far more into the idea of people gift giving when they want to and not when they feel they have to, I’m now running a Childrens home and I do appreciate the fun the festivities can give to them.

DSCF5125 As art and craft is already a popular activity at Stratton House we decided to give the kids a chance to produce some homemade Christmas cards.

This has proved such a popular pass time and produced some great results that have convinced us to try our hand at producing both seasonal and general greetings cards, postcards, etc.

DSCF5120 These products will soon be available in our, soon to open, online shop, under the heading ‘Because You Care’. All profits will go in to The Stratton ABC Foundation general fund and go towards helping us to give disadvantaged kids from in and around Chiang Mai and Lamphun A Better Chance.

For anyone who may own a business in or around Chiang Mai or Lamphun and feel that their premises may be a suitable location for one of our collection boxes, please contact me ,(John), using the contact link at the bottom of the page.

before school300 So now Stratton House Childrens Home in Ban Mae Salab, 2km off Highway 11, turning left for Banthi at the Banthi/Sarapee intersection, has now been open for nearly 2 weeks and is presently looking after 3 disadvantaged children from Chiang Mai/ Lamphun areas. So far so good with all the children settling in well with a pretty rapid rapport with their House Mother, Wassana.

All the children have already been placed in local primary schools and are on a high nutrition diet to ensure good health.

The Stratton ABC Foundation website is being improved over the coming days. It already has a link to a spreadsheet detailing all details of contributions, expenditure and running fund total.

There will soon be Childrens profile pages carrying details of how you can Sponsor an individual child.

There will also be news of the Stratton ABC Foundations work on setting up independent monitoring by recruiting ‘Advocates’ for each child who will be encouraged to visit on a regular basis and highlight any concerns that they or the children may have. It is the Foundations hope that this service could eventually be offered to other similar organisations to encourage the best of standards in child care in this area.

fans300 Moving ever closer to opening the facility to children in need, here in Chiang Mai, we are proud to say that we are now getting more and more help from the local community who are showing a wish to support our project. For the past three days we have been visited by an electrical work crew from a nearby village who have given their services free, fitting wall fans, a heated shower and generally checking the safety of our electrics.
We are expecting our first placements to begin on November first, with the scheduled arrival of our first child from a small village in Lamphun, whoes family clearly have no means to care for him properly.
If you are interested in supporting Stratton House Childrens home in any way please visit http://www.thestrattonabcfoundation.com and contact us through the site., or alternatively contact me using the link at the bottom of the page.

posts Our work preparing Stratton House Childrens Home has progressed well and was further helped by a visit from our Australian friends, Heather, Luca and Chloe from our Faa Gamma Fund Raising Team. We would like to thank them very much for their donations of clothes, bedsheets and games and for their physical help during their visit. The photo shows the fenceposts that our visitors funded and helped to start preparing, here they are in various stages of being painted.You can see full details on The Stratton ABC Foundation website. We are always keen for help and support from volunteers or any one wishing to donate to our cause. Take a look at what we’re doing and if you’d like to help in anyway please contact me at john@travel-and-life-in-thailand.co.uk.

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Celebrating The Kings Birthday

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