Thailand -- Maikeedfai in Nakhon Ratchasima

The day after hour visit at the Thai Health Promotion Foundation, during my trip in Thailand, our group visited an educational group focused on young children called Maikeedfai in Nakhon Ratchasima, headed by Mr Kui (his Facebook-profile). Maikeedfai is one of many small programs that gets funding from the THPF. Maikeedfai helps to get young children involved in healthy after school activities. They explained that most Thai children just go home after school and sits in front of the television the whole day watching TV or playing video games. Basically Maikeedfai has an after school care centre that gets children out in nature or involved in fun, healthy, and education activities.

 (I made the clay kitten and pony.)

After showing us some of the ways they keep children busy (like how to make bubbles, clay and other messy stuff) we departed to one of Maikeedfai’s other projects – Sex Education.

We went to a school where Maikeedfai had worked on Sex Education. One of the grades had prepared a play which they performed for us. The moral of the play was basically to wait, and if you have sex, to have it safely – use condoms. As is commonly known, the sex industry is lucrative in Thailand and children are tempted into it at an unfortunate young age. Part of the problem, we were told, are that parents do not educate their children on sex. A western man I spoke to who have lived in Thailand for about a decade told me that incest and molestation is also very prevalent in the rural areas, which just increases the problem of skewed perceptions of sex at a very early age among many Thai people – especially those coming from rural areas.