The Children of Pakui

"Its not easy to build a school in a country where your visa needs to be renewed every year even though you are married to a Thai woman", says Paulo, the owner of the resort - Old Tree's house in Thaton, Thailand.

" I am a Builder" - Paulo, Tha Ton

 A 61 year old french settler whose eyes always lit up when he spoke about the kids was helping me peel the layers of Thailand's external skin as he explained, "Its a good economy with education and health care being provided in abundance for every Thai person, well, almost every Thai, with the exception of this hill tribe called Lahu"

The Lahu's are on their own when it comes to education with minimal support from the government. This was enough to get Paulo thinking. 

The Old Tree house is a guest house located in the city of Tha Ton http://www.oldtreeshouse.net/en/en_gallerie.html and has been beautifully built and designed by Paulo himself. He believes in eco-tourism. What he didn't realize was that social tourism was a natural fall-out of his original business plan which to this day he claims he didn't actually exist. 

The Pakui School of Hope

Having been a builder his entire life, he felt it was time to give back and settled in Thailand where he met his wife and has been living in Tha Ton for the last 13 years.  Paulo also provides shelter for the Chan refugees from Myanmar. 

The Pakui School of hope houses 49 children all of whom belong to the Pakui Village. There are about 250 people belonging to the Lahu tribe and are led by their Chief.  When a tribe member gets married and has kids, they have to move out of the village in order to maintain the balance. The village cannot afford to house more than the magic 250.  

The Children of Pakui

The Painted Classroom

The kids had a mesmerizingly delightful free spirit to them and Paulo explained to me about the educational system and how they decided to adopt local teachers primarily to keep costs low. Slowly, one room expanded into three and a local group approached Paulo to help hand paint the walls in the class rooms. 

Yo Wassup

The kids were initially shy but super cute and extremely sincere and slowly started opening up to me. I noticed how at times the kids took turns and sought to be excused from the classroom to get some fresh air and tap some ping pong which is a famous sport in Thailand.  I guess it's a universal curiosity with kids and cameras and my mind raced to the memories of a 6 year old kid from Madras, India that held his first Kodak Entralite 10 camera and went trigger happy. I guess camera's and me have had a long standing and a very evolved partnership since then. As I held my camera, focussing away, a bunch of kids came up to me and pretended to be models. 

"We are always looking for ideas and people to exchange ideas with and are open to support from any part of the world", mused Paulo. I could sense that this man had done a lot all by himself and took one day off in a week to completely shut down and relax - this was his vacation.  To him it didn't matter how little or how much was achieved during that 13 year window as long as he stayed true to what he knew - 'building'. 

To me on the other hand, Paulo is a classic example of someone who started off with a skillset that changed his mindset and his approach to life for ever, he went from building structures to building lives...

Ping me!

I walked away from Pakui totally inspired, but also intrigued. There were a million ideas floating in my head, but first, I would need to connect Paulo to the Children's Project and also my next idea was to promote a tea within The Tea Garage portfolio named after Paulo and his community.  I shared this idea with Paulo who smiled and exclaimed - "you have plenty of good ideas - I wish you well"

It's time to start drinking more tea and this time it will be an Oolong from Doi Mae Salong which I decided would be the next logical stop. 

"There's a Songthaew http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songthaew to Mae Salong in 30 minutes, I'll drop you at the pick up point"

So while its back on the road for me again, The magic of Tha Ton will keep steeping in my cup for a long time.