By Heather Askew | Project Leader
Our trafficking prevention program is still going strong. We have started working with a large children's home to equip their staff to train the children on these issues. We recently were lucky enough to have Healing Arts Peace Project come provide a training on Trauma Informed Care to the staff from government children's homes and private homes alike, which was wonderful. We even had the opportunity to go to a mountain village and teach the children there about protecting themselves from sexual abuse and how to report if they or a friend ever experiences it. The kids favorite part of this day was getting to have their faces painted like their favorite superhero. It's a reminder that we don't need superpowers to be a superhero, we just need to protect and support each other.
On the foster care front, we have been meeting regularly with the staff from the emergency shelter and the government orphanage and they will begin sending children who are about to transition into either adoptive families or back to their biological families to stay with our team for a month or two. This will allow the children who will stay in Thailand to adjust to life in a small family home rather than being one of many children in a large orphanage and transition with Thai people. In addition, for children who will be adopted overseas, this will give them an opportunity to stay with Westerners and learn to eat western food and speak English regularly. This will make their adjustment period to a new country go more smoothly for them and the adoptive families.
Since the government still doesn't have a support budget for children in short term or transitional foster care, we are most likely going to close this particular funding page soon and create two separate ones: one for foster care to help support the Thai families providing interim care to children and one to continue providing training to those working with at risk children to provide them the skills to prevent children from being victimized and exploited.
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