Sarnelli House Orphanage

Due to the summer holidays in Thailand being so long (over two months in my case), we are meant to do a secondary project of some kind for a week or so during this time. There are lots of different things to choose from in Thailand such as doing a temple meditation course, volunteering at an Elephant or Orangutan sanctuary or volunteering at an Orphanage. As I had the opportunity to learn a lot about HIV and AIDS at school by doing a peer education course with Christian Aid, I decided to volunteer for a week at Sarnelli House Orphanage in Nong Khai - a home for children who have HIV or have been abandoned. I arrived on Tuesday 26th April, and left on Tuesday 3rd May and the time flew by!
The orphanage is run by Father Mike who I met on my second or third day there, and he is brilliant - he is the perfect mix of 'loving' and 'slightly scary' which means that the kids respect him and know that he is always looking out for them. He is extremely realistic too and knows exactly what the orphanage and the kids need all the time. As well as him there is one other full time foreigner, Kate, who helps with looking after the children and day to day running of the orphanage. Then there are the House Mums who are all stars - most of them are from the same family, and are all Thais, who spend their lives looking after the children and making them feel as safe and at home as possible. There are several Houses that make up the orphanage, each for children of different ages as well as two Houses for children without HIV. Each House has several house mothers who cook for the children, look after them when they are sick, play with them and generally love them and give them someone to look up to as their mother. My role was to help the House Mothers in looking after and amusing the children. As soon as I arrived I was greeted and shown around by Marloes, a Dutch volunteer on her fourth visit to the Orphanage, and it wasn't long before I literally had one child on each arm talking so fast I'm surprised a Thai speaker could understand them! I also met Jim who is a frequent volunteer to the Orphanage
The bulk of each day was filled with bringing games or activities to the children, taking them swimming, and generally keeping them occupied and out of trouble! On the Friday some of the kids went to Udon Thani, about an hour away, for a check up with the Doctor and then to the Big C for lunch. They each got some money to spend in Big C (a shopping centre) as a treat after visiting the doctor which they all loved. Some of the girls were also treated to new swimming costumes as they had grown out of their old ones.
The next day there was a trip for some of the kids to the zoo near Kon Kaen. Most of what I've heard about zoos in Thailand hasn't been great, and my experience of the Crocodile Farm in Pattaya was awful so I was a bit wary about what it was going to be like. Thankfully however, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. There were no lions or tigers in tiny cages, mainly just deer and a large enclosure which had a few zebras and giraffes in it. There was a sign pointing to "elephants", but no one could find them... I helped lead around an 18 year old blind girl called TaDum who is absolutely brilliant - we had so much fun wandering around, and the other Thai kids were able to tell her what animal it was that they were looking at. Unfortunately, on the way back to the orphanage we had to stop in Nong Khai to take a boy to hospital as he was having a bad reaction to some medication he had been given a few days earlier. Kate stayed with him for a while and talked to the doctors, and thankfully the next day he was getting better.
One thing that I found the kids loved to do was colouring in, and so I now have a handful of Tom and Jerry and Disney Princess colouring in sheets that the kids gave to me. They are very sweet, some of them have even written "love chompoo" at the top! (Chompoo is my Thai name). They also all LOVE to go swimming, and one time when Jim, Marloes, Kate and I took a group of kids swimming, we took Nut, who is blind, and Soi who had difficulty walking. Both of them were extremely shy at first, I think it was their first time trying to swim. After trying to talk to Soi, who was too shy to say anything, I went away for a while and played with some of the other kids. When I returned to Soi, I managed to get her to take my hand and walk to the end of the shallow end using the edge of the pool as support. She loved it, and after walking up and down the shallow end a few times she got onto my back and I took her the whole length of the pool. By this point she was coming more and more out of her shell, and was making me chase Jim around so she could splash him with water! When she was back in the shallow end she was brave enough to walk across the pool without using the side to support her, then even tried swimming on her front. It was brilliant to see her go from being too shy to speak to actually trying to swim on her own and chatting to me. The same pattern was mirrored with Nut, the blind girl, who went around the pool on Kate's back.
As well as me amusing the children they definitely managed to keep me busy. I have learned how to make paper cranes, how to play "Zombie" on the guitar, and how to get a stubborn 4 year old out of a tree. One boy decided it would be a brilliant idea to swap shoes, so I had to find him and convince him that my shoes were rubbish and he really, REALLY wanted his own ones back. Eventually he decided that an even better idea would be for us each to have one of my shoes and one of his shoes. Halfway there. Finally I managed to get my shoe back and safe, but it took a while!
The orphanage is a few km out of Nong Khai town itself, and is in a very rural area. There is Sarnelli House and Nazareth House which are close to the house that volunteers stay in, then there is House of Hope, Jan and Oscar House and St.Patrick's Boys House about two km away. This is where the swimming pool is. Our Lady Of Refuge House for Girls is in Viengkhuk which is about 10km away so I only got to go there once, but all the houses are equally as cared for and looked after. It was brilliant spending time with all the kids and seeing them enjoying themselves - as soon as they see a volunteer approaching it's like they set off some sort of signal and the whole troop comes running to see what game you've brought or just to spend time with you.
Charlene House is where the volunteers stay, and P.Daa works there cooking and cleaning and generally keeping the place in order. She is lovely, and believes that Charlene House is haunted. After a few nights there, I must admit that I believe it is too!
I definitely plan on coming back to Sarnelli for a couple of weeks or so when I come back to Thailand.