Yikes we are back in the US !

Well we have been back in the US since 15th of April. The last 2-3 weeks before we left Thailand were very busy as we left Chiang Mai on April 4th and then spent 10 days in Bangkok. We attended almost 6 days of Dhamma discussions with friends, some of whom came from Hong Kong, Canada and Australia. There is a whole cadre of friends who studied Abidhamma with Ajahn Suchin 30 years ago who seem to be coming back to these meetings.

The final weeks in Chiang Mai were very hectic because we wanted to finish some of our projects. One thing we have not done in the Blog was to talk about Kids Ark Foundation where we volunteered most of the time. One way to learn about Kids Ark is to watch the presentation we did for the princess of Sweden who came on behalf of a charitable group.

You can watch it on-line (You may need to download a viewer program so click whatever you need to do; it will prompt you once you click the link below)
The address is: http://www.kidsarkfoundation.org/kafen.html

We could not have found a better organization to work with! The founders, Rita and Allan from Sweden, our friend Ron from New Hampshire and the Thai staff are all a great team. Kids Ark is a very busy organization that does many things to help poor children receive the education they need so as to be able to escape the cycle of poverty. Most of these children are from ethnic minorities (hill-tribes); their parents have died of Aids, so to encourage school-attendance and to enable them to stay with their extended families instead of being sent to orphanages, Kids Ark has a sponsorship program for the children.

Funding for Kids Ark comes from Swedish donations, sponsors for children and grants. We are planning to setup a Kids Ark USA 501c3 foundation so people here can make tax deductible donations and sponsor children. In fact, have brought back some student profiles to look for sponsors here. All of the students we brought back were initially sponsored, but for various reasons their sponsorship stopped. If any of you are interested in "picking up the ball" please, please contact me. Kids Ark does a very thorough job of monitoring the students school attendance and performance. The staff visit the children 4 times a year, and 2 times a year reports are sent to the sponsors. The 5 person staff of Kids Ark do almost 1200 visits a year! Many students live over 3 hours away in villages which are not always easily accessible. Visiting the students, their relatives/care givers and teachers is a time consuming task. They interview the student, caregiver and teachers to make sure there are no problems at home or school.

Some of the other projects we worked on were: Updating the website to better describe Kids Ark (still in progress), redoing their brochure in English and Thai - Done! Created a slide show for visitors, and helping Red Lahu ethnic minority villages that Kids Ark supports with various projects. Tom also helped with some IT issues with their network and hopefully instituted a backup regime. We also created a database of sponsors, students and the other needed information, and taught the staff how to extract that information for reports, letters, labels etc. Not everything we wanted to accomplish was finished, and, as Beverly remarked towards the end of our stay, "Gee, we are working more hours here than we did at Compucare!"

On our return it took about a week to get our sleep patterns back to normal. A few days after returning we went to the taping of a radio show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me in Hartford CT with Amara. It was interesting and fun to be in the audience at the taping of a radio show. The host Peter Sagal is very funny and the jokes about Bush meeting the Pope were fantastic. You can listen to the show by clicking the link above. On our return, we welcomed Danny, a Rotary exchange student from Indonesia, to stay with us until the end of June . He has survived a long and very snowy winter! When we arrived home most of the snow was gone and the daffodils and crocus were blooming. Now the forsythia is in full bloom so we know spring is here, even though we still think it is too cold!

It has been fun seeing friends and just doing projects we have been meaning to do for 20 years :-) Going to the supermarket still seems like going to another planet but we are settling back in quite well.

We do plan to return to Chiang Mai and Kids Ark Foundation at the end of October for another 6 month stint but also plan to do more traveling in the region.

It has been fun writing the "Blogs", we will see if we can continue in Nov 2008 when we return.
tom and bev