Dave is back in town

Finally i'm back in Bangkok!
Today is one year exactly since i left and it's great to be back. This time i'm only away for about 6 weeks and tomorrow i head down to the Cambodian border for a month or so.

A short update on the project situation:

We have secured grants from; LOMEF, UNESCO, TEAR Fund Australia, Friends and Family and Personal fundraising totaling over $20,000 AUD (600,000 THB), which is enough to cover the set up of the project to include 100 families on the original budget.

Out of our own pockets we are sponsoring a girl how helped us out a lot to finish school and go to uni if she wants. I have raised a little money for this and we hope that she can work for us as well as a social worker.

We had to let our Khmer project helper go but this week we are hiring 3 more staff so i'm going to have an interesting time trying to scale up the project while Andrea goes home for xmas. It might be a little like the blind leading the blind for a while but i will have Julian, a friend of Leigh’s down there for a while to help so it should be fine.

We are expanding to include 15 more families soon and we are starting to work on building some sort of co-op structure so that the project will almost run itself eventually.

One of my personal goals while i'm there is to make a serious effort at getting the girls who inspired the whole thing into the project. So far we have help off until everything was stable because we didn't want to scare them off if things were not working 100% but not all is flowing and finally, over 2 years since i first met them we are finally in the position to really help them.

Can't wait to get down there and get into it.. exciting times. Stay posted for pictures and day by day updates from the ground.