Halfway around the world in the country of Thailand as many as 40 children live in one house. Taken in by a compassionate man who doesn’t want to see these children sold into a life of bondage. He has sacrificed his own family to help these orphaned children. These children have no country, they are refugees from the 60 year long genocide in Burma. Without help they will likely face deportation back to Burma where they would be killed, bondage in the child sex trade, and/or starvation and death.

There are poor children all over the world, but this week I will introduce you to The Charis Project, a 501-(c)3 agency, started by Carrien Blue and her husband Aaron that is actually making a difference in children’s lives.

I was recently able to interview Carrien and I will be sharing the interview with you all week. For more information how you can help, click the button above or the widget in our sidebar.

Me: How did you first hear of the children being exploited in Thailand?

Our initial reason for going to Thailand, and still our main reason, is that we were asked by members of the refugee tribal communities to go and help them to get the skills they need. They really want to work to improve the situation of their own villages but lack the necessary education and resources. For instance, they would like to learn how to grow rice without using fertilizer of pesticides because it contaminates the drinking water and everyone is sick. They also want to learn about building and maintaining village water systems that filter clean water and deal with waste. They want to be free of the fear based animist mindset that keeps them in financial, emotional, and spiritual bondage. They want to learn how to plan ahead again. After several generations of just trying to stay alive their culture has become quite short sighted.

We happen to be able to provide much of that, and have a network of people with the other information we don’t have who are willing to help. We have family already living and working in Thailand in other areas and it was they who first encountered this group of people and told us they are desperate to have someone come and teach them and help them with the things they are already doing. They aren’t Thai. They are all from refugee camps and villages on the northern border near Burma.

A lot of people aren’t aware that there is a genocide going on in Burma, and has been for 60 years. The Burmese government seems intent on obliterating the hill tribes, ethnic minorities, within their own borders. Tribes such as the Lahu, Karen, Shan, and Hmong are among the people groups that are under attack. One old woman in a refugee camp in Northern Thailand told my brother in law that the Burmese army would come and surround a village with heavy artillery and give them 2 hours to give up all their food, pigs and women, or they would fire on the village and kill every one, and then take what they wanted anyway. “We were tired of the army taking away everything, so we came here.” She concluded.

That’s why there are all of these subsistence tribal communities, essentially squatting, on land in the hills of Thailand.

When we started forming relationships with these people and finding the best way to help them we discovered that many have taken in children who have no where else to go. A lot of these kids are orphaned by the war in Burma and get to Thailand on their own. Some of them are left to fend for themselves by the breakdown in family and community structures that resulted from living in the aftermath of war; poverty, death of one or both parents, etc. If no one takes care of these kids there are two outcomes for them that are more than likely. They will either be taken into custody by the police, sent to adult containment facilities, and eventually sent back to Burma, or, they will be kidnapped off of the streets by slave traders and put to work as prostitutes in brothels in Bangkok. Human trafficking in Thailand, especially the sale of children for sex, is a huge industry. Sometimes the police don’t bother sending the kids back to Burma, sometimes they are the ones selling the kids to the traffickers.

The families taking these children in and trying to take care of them have nothing to begin with. They live in huts built from bamboo and grow rice and vegetables and raise pigs to survive. Yet, some of them have taken in as many as 40 kids into their homes. As you can imagine, the amount of strain that this kind of thing would cause is significant. Even if they are able to grow enough rice to feed everyone, which assumes they have enough land to work with, there is still the difficulty of paying for school tuition, clothing, medical care, etc. Imagine if you suddenly had 40 kids in your house to take care of. It’s an epic amount of work.

It was apparent that one of the first and most urgent ways to help was to provide a support structure for taking care of all of these orphaned children.

There are some good ideas for creating self sustaining children’s homes that could operate without outside funding, from the people who are right now doing the work, but they are at least 3 or more years down the road, and these kids don’t have that long.