As Director of KHT, I have the opportunity to visit our beneficiaries and see our construction teams in action. This week I visited the villages of Ban Huay Ha Mai and Ban Huay Kong Paw in the Mae La Noi district.
In Huay Ha Mai, KHT has just completed a WASH System that will provide the village with cleaner and more reliable water. There will be two special taps for clean drinking water, an overflow system for water that can be used for planting and farming and it is a village wide system to support also other needs such as washing and cleaning.
We were shown around the village which is home to more around 145 people, and the water system will also support another 16 households from a nearby village. I noted that on our drive back, children were walking back from their school, which can take them up to 2 hours a day. The road is a bumpy, dirt road with many blind-spots and narrow sections. This make the journey a dangerous one and many times parents need to take time out from farming to walk with their children. KHT was hoping to support the school with a bus, however the distance and the impact of weather means a bus would not be able to work throughout the year. For this reason, KHT will be looking into how else we can support the children.
Huay Kong Paw is a large village of more than 100 families and is spread out across the landscape. It has a school and kindergarten and as I arrived, KHT’s Flood Resistant Irrigation System was being completed. The villagers work with our team and have constructed a system that will help prevent flood damage and channel water to the right places. I was told that prior to KHT’s help, the bamboo dams they used would get damaged within a few days and that the village had seen flash floods over the last year. KHT’s system will provide much needed infrastructure that can withstand this flooding and ensure the safety of the fields.
Both villages show the ways in which the Karen build their homes and communities and it is always nice to be welcomed into homes and shown how KHT is helping improve their quality of life. As a city dweller, it is always fascinating to see how people grow their own food and raise animals, as well as the many ways in which they use their natural environment in their lives either through herbs and plants for health, or carving into the landscape to create space for growing crops. I am hoping to visit more villages during my stay in Thailand and working with our team to support more villages!
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