Wandering around Mae Sariang

Spent the last week up in the north west frontier area of Thailand based in the town of Mae Sariang, between towering mountains and rivers.

Near here are many many displaced people fleeing from Burma and there are volunteers risking their lives to help them reach these shores.

The children in these pictures are from an orphanage a few hours from there. They are not all orphans but many have left their parents and families behind. In this particular safe haven there are also the children of a few widows who can not feed and raise their children so they come here and work at weaving scarves on foot looms. These are sold and the widow gets some of the money and the rest goes to keep her child/children in the orphanage. In the picture they are lining up to get milk and cookies after school but we mainly concentrate on bringing huge bags of rice for their necessary main meals. Luckily they to be nourished and happy although the whole place came down with malaria last year. Certainly they are tough and well able to stand their ground while being so polite and kind to strangers and the little ones in fact there is a hut for babies with each one cared for by an older child.

We made our way along the Salawin River, so close that we could have "thrown a biscuit on the Burmese shore" as Wolfe Tone once remarked about Bantry. We could not use a boat as planned as the area is dangerous now as the border often is. The roads are so bad it took 90 minutes to drive about 18 miles. From here the children are reminded daily of the villages that were home just across the river.