Thailand: Urgent appeal from Fr Ray Foundation

SoS Rice Appeal

The Father Ray Foundation in Pattaya, Thailand, cares for about 145 orphans in a their children's village, as well as providing education for hundreds more underprivileged youngsters with disabilities, special needs, and blind and visually impaired students. Much of their funding comes from local businesses and the tourist trade. Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit Thailand their income has virtually stopped.

Volunteer Derek Franklin writes: I have been working at the Father Ray Foundation here in Pattaya Thailand for almost twenty years. I have not only seen our work grow to help more underprivileged children and students with disabilities, I have also seen Pattaya grow in size, becoming one of the busiest and most popular holiday resort towns in the world.

This is now high season, a time when millions of foreign tourists arrive to have fun, relax and enjoy themselves, but this season no one has arrived.

Pattaya relies on tourists, but due to the Covid-19 coronavirus, the borders have been closed to foreigners for many months.

Nightclubs, bars, hotels, restaurants, travel agents, car rental shops, massage parlours, even many 7-11 stores are closed, most will never reopen. Everywhere you look there are For Sale or For Rent signs, but who will want to open a new business when there are no tourists?

A lot of the income for the Father Ray Foundation comes from the locals, that has stopped.

Our annual SOS Rice Appeal in early December was a total failure; we raised more cash in one store on one day in 2019, than we made from eight stores over three days in December 2020.

For many years our children and students have sung Christmas carols around the hotels on Christmas Eve. We usually send out several bus loads of children and students, going in all directions and visiting up to thirty hotels in one evening, collecting cash donations: Christmas 2020 we visited two hotels and a supermarket.

We have 145 children living at the Father Ray Children's Village who are on lockdown, again. We also have several hundred students with disabilities, special needs children and our blind and visually impaired students, they will all return back to school next month, if allowed.

We need your help so that we can continue to give the children and students in our care the home, the education, therapy, food and medical help they need. To make a donation please see: www.fr-ray.org/emergency-appeal-2021/