Project Proposal And Challenge

To understand the need or justification behind this project it is necessary to first understand the cultural environment that exists for disabled children and adults in north Thailand -  realities and conditions that have little, if anything, to do with common standards or policies practiced in western nations.  A disabled child or adult in Thailand, in order to access even minimal public support, must first meet government imposed definitions of disability and be examined by a salaried government physician who answers to a bureaucratic web of government and political authorities who set policies and constraints. Constraints that may or may not have any connection with public health or medicine.

If a disabled child or adult is successfully certified as “disabled”, the maximum monthly support they can receive is 500 Thai Baht per month – currently the equivalent of U.S. 16 dollars per month.  It does not require a university degree to understand the impossible challenges an unemployed or home-bound disabled person (or a family caregiver) confronts in attempting to survive on U.S. 16 dollars per month.

After careful evaluation, it is our hope to expand our existing ‘Baan Piranan’ project by purchasing approximately 300 talong wah of main road access land near our offices and build a larger and more complete facility including a larger children’s care room, a health and therapy clinic room with therapy facilities, a kitchen in which to prepare free and nutritious noon meals for patients, appropriate and accessible bath facilities, and 6 minimally furnished interim emergency shelter rooms.  Rather than having our therapists continue to visit homes (as they do now) on a dangerous and limiting motorcycle, we propose to purchase an economical van, employ a driver with one assistant, and pick up and deliver patients on a weekly basis delivering them to a well equipped and hygienically controlled clinic environment where their hygiene and therapy needs will be professionally attended to, and where they will experience a release from their perpetual home confinement by giving them an opportunity to communicate with others.

We are not exaggerating when we report that in some home visit instances where no bathing facilities exist, we bathe children in an open garden with a garden hose, or even by laying plastic on the ground, inflating an inner tube, and placing a disabled child inside the ring of the tube as a makeshift bath tub.

Please help us make a difference, we need your support and donations.

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