Like a Tourist: A bit about Warm Heart Worldwide and its people

I spent Easter weekend visiting some of the remote hill tribe villages that the kids of Warm Heart call home. It was en eye opening experience in more ways than one. The lives led here are extremely basic. The roads are impassable during rainy season leaving the communities almost entirely cut off for months at a time. People live basically hand to mouth, with farming and manual labour the main source of income, but on the steep hillsides farmland is limited and labour jobs are only available for seven months of the year.

It is a life with little opportunity other than following in the parents footsteps, since there are few schools and those that are in place are poorly equipped and if not completely teacher-less. If kids from these communities make it to a Thai run school they are far behind in formal education, and often cannot speak Thai – purely their own tribal language. The skill base among the adults in the villages is limited, so finding work in the affluent south is almost impossible. As a result problems with alcohol, child, domestic and drug abuse are rife, as well as TB, HIV, and diabetes.

The welcoming committee

In a village with very little I was interested to see a satellite dish.
But no sign of a television as far as I could see...

This old man was snapped by the mini me photographer C

These kids from the village were so happy to pose for snaps once they
warmed up to us. These cheeky grins made my day!

We turned up to this village to find all the kids with make up on! We are yet
to work out if it's the norm, out of boredom, or in celebration of Thai New year.

This little lady was also all made up

Cheeky chappy

Waiting at the bus stop

Superstar in the making

No one escaped the make up session at this village.
Check out the eyebrows!

These kids were loving the camera

Younger sibling of one of our kids, Viggo

Warm Heart is working in a myriad of ways to change this. Their children’s home offers a nurturing environment for children from broken homes or families unable to support them. They are welcomed into a loving family and provided with opportunities previously unavailable to them. The children enter the Thai schools system and work hard to get their education and Thai language level up to the standard of their peers. They are being given the choice to broaden their future options beyond that of the villages in the hills. The first Warm Heart children are starting to enrol in universities and colleges now, while more and more young children are arriving to join the warm heart family.

Brothers B and A are some of my favourites of the Warm Heart kids.

Along with their younger brother C they were dropped off at Warm

Heart without anyone knowing much about them.

They are so caring to each other it is clear they have been left

to fend for themselves on many occasions. I imagine they'll be fiercely loyal

to each other forever and it makes my heart sing.

A and Lom are best buddies and it's a joy to see their
ability to be in each others company for hours at a time

Warm Heart kids Lom, A and Ying riding like pros on
the bumpy roads that lead to the villages

Warm Heart also works closely with the people still living in the mountain villages to work out what help they need, such as skills training, pre-schools, agricultural improvements and basic health services. Their programs are aimed to help people pull themselves out of the cycles of poverty, rather than offering free hand-outs. This is what attracted me to Warm Heart in the first place. I’m thrilled to be here, getting to know the kids, the staff, and the local way of life and best of all, with the opportunity to make videos that (hopefully) matter!

After seeing the isolated, basic and generally impoverished villages where these children started their lives, I better understand the situations that brought them to Warm Heart. There is certainly a lot of love and community spirit in the villages as we saw when we visited, but plenty of hardships too. The houses are bare, and there is little to do or to stimulate young minds.

En route to the first village. The road was being built meaning soon it might
be accessible even during rainy season. The workmen weren't in a rush to move
their truck to let us pass so we took the opportunity to stretch our legs.

The houses are basic, rarely with much furniture
and most certainly sleeping is on the floor

Colourful clothes

Gardening paraphernalia

Handmade baskets

Shell door hanging. One of the few decorations
seen in the villages

Not sure what this contraption is for

All the dogs are macho on the outside but turn to

jelly as soon as you show them some kindness

Shoes off before you enter!

Wide eyed wonder

Welly tree

Home sweet home

Big and little

Water of life

This grandma was wearing fantastic tribal costume

Another dog with bark worse than it's bite,
observing us strangers from a safe distance

This once again reminds me how lucky I am to be born where I was, with the (at times overwhelming) plethora of choices, resources, and opportunities available to me. I also feel lucky to have had the opportunity to get to know these plucky kids, to laugh with them, teach them, learn from them and eventually be let in by them. Many have been abandoned or let down by adults, and they see so many volunteers come and go, so it’s not surprising that many volunteers find them to be cold at first. And so did I. But after spending more time with them I have been accepted and even (I like to think) trusted and liked by most of them. It’s fascinating to observe the idiosyncratic personalities of each child shining through and truly heart warming to observe their interactions and close relationships with each other develop in this unique family set up. And the gleeful smiles on the kids’ faces that greet us every day remind me to find laughter and joy in more things that I do each day.

Whether it’s an alcoholic mother, an absent father, or perhaps an imprisoned one, or simply that the family is unable to sustain all their children in a satisfactory way, these children have found their way to Warm Heart and a loving, supportive adoptive family. One that I’m glad to be a part of if only for a brief time.

A testing out the mulberries after picking

B and one of the village boys taking some time out

A new addition to the Warm Heart clan and a sister of one of the girls here.
This photo was actually taken by B (7 years old!) a photographer in the making

The best swing EVER! Unfortunately broken so
not used to its utmost.

Kids in truck

A favourite backpack

Lom showing off the mulberries

Picnic lunch with fellow volunteers Yura and Omar up front.
The man on the left is Jing, the house father at the children's home.

Delicious lunch of pork and sticky rice

Lunch

A attempting to shift this dead weight

Mew (sp?) having a moment by the falls

B having a quiet moment. He always strikes me as a thoughtful young man
and can often be seen quietly focused on a task, oblivious of his brothers' distractions

Ying skipping down for lunch

Group shot

We found these new as can be puppies in one of the
of the villages. Unlike the other dogs they were very
friendly to humans as they had not yet learned to be afraid