During August 2005 one of our supporters Fiona, a West Sussex Middle School teacher, expressed an interest in visiting Pattaya during her school’s summer holiday and to help with teaching in a Pattaya school. We helped arrange this with Dianne Doell in Pattaya and at the beginning of August Fiona flew out to Pattaya at her own expense and spent two weeks visiting the school and seeing for herself the conditions at some of the slums. One of the highlights of Fiona’s visit was meeting the four children that she and her partner sponsor and seeing for herself the conditions in which they live. Fiona also spent a lot of time at the street kids shelter using her teaching skills to show the Thai staff how to develop educational activities for the children there. Before her visit the children would spend most of their time sitting in front of a television without any other stimulation, now there are set learning activities for the children. Fiona described her two weeks working in Pattaya as exhausting and harrowing.

Tragically a few months after Fiona's visit the father of Jikarit, of one of her sponsored children (bottom photo) who was working as a security guard was murdered,