Help Stateless children achieve Thai citizenship

We have been working on many cases over the summer, but now are in a holding pattern for most of them, as all the paperwork has been submitted. We just submitted paperwork for another two teenage boys, younger siblings of some of our clients in our income generating program. Their ID cards should process more quickly as they have all their paperwork in order, but just had never turned it in to apply for their ID cards. We have around 5 cases that are just waiting on numbers to be assigned and several other cases that are being reviewed by the citizenship officers at the local level. 

We are regularly asked for advice from other families when we go to the various county offices and provide as much assistance as we can to each family. Some we are able to take on as clients, but some don't follow up with us to provide the necessary information, so we can't help them any further. We are hopeful that this will be the last generation who will need this assistance, as it is becoming far more common for people to have babies in hospitals that provide paperwork than having them as a home birth. Even those who have home births are registering more quickly at the government offices to get the proper paperwork to submit for their ID cards when the children reach age 7. 

Thank you for your support of this project. We are happy to report that Sarah's 2 children finally got their citizenship cards on May 13! 

In our last update we said Koranid would get her ID card in April, but she actually got it February 13! Such exciting news for both families. 

In order to help move cases along when government offices are stubborn and refuse to do their jobs, Jay has registered to start law school. In Thailand, this is the same price as regular university tuition (about $250 a semester) so we are excited that he will soon be able to have some more influence on these cases that have dragged on for years. There are not many lawyers who handle this types of case, so the demand for our assistance will surely continue to grow once he has his law license! 

We currently have 18 cases that we are working on, in various stages of the process. Our youngest client is 8 years old, our oldest is 59! 

One thing that would help us improve our services in this area is to have a 4WD vehicle that can get to remote villages so we can pick up witnesses who need to testify for our clients' citizenship cases. Each case needs 4-6 witnesses to verify the person was born in Thailand and most of the time, these witnesses live in remote villages. On July 12, we will participate in GlobalGiving's Bonus Day campaign, and hope to raise enough money to purchase a Toyota Fortuner 4WD SUV so we can get to more remote locations and assist more clients. Please mark your calendars and consider giving to this campaign in July!