I am often overwhelmed, not just by the suffering and struggle I both witness and feel in the world, but by the day to day of making do as a single mom, running my business, watching the petrol gauge hover around empty most days and endlessly juggling time, fatigue and resources with my desire to grow and do more.
It was into that space that I received a message, a distress call, a couple of weeks ago. Saw Diamond Khin, Director of the Karen Department of Health and Welfare, is my indigenous liaison person for my Organic Frontiers herbal project along the Thai Burmese border. Together he and I are inching forward in our project to create organic, sustainable, social enterprise to ensure the Karen refugee people under his care - tens of thousands of people - have some possibility of food security, warmth and shelter.
"We need more clothes. The people are freezing."
How cold has it been overnight in the mountains along the Thai Burma border?
In an environment where this has been the Field Hospital:
most people live in simple bamboo shelters with teak-leaf roofs, if they're that lucky. To be sleeping up off the cold earth is a privilege definitely not shared by all.
I had recently already sent a large donation of clothes, towels and bedding I had quietly collected. And it had been immediately distributed. Textile waste is definitely a first world luxury idea.
Many, many people missed out and literally had only the tshirt they were standing in to come between them and the deep cold of the misty nights in the mountains. It doesn't snow because the air is too dry, but it can be bitterly cold.
And so I did the only thing I could think of to do: I wrote a blog asking for help and clothing-bedding donations, arranged a couple of collection points and sent my intention out into the world as I pressed "publish":
Here is my original ask for support to our local Thai and expat community: Urgent Need for Warm Clothing & Bedding for Displaced Karen Refugee People
And people from all over Chiang Mai responded with generosity.
It took a lot of collecting, lifting and co-ordinating, but a week later I sent another truck full again to Gyi Gyi (our affectionate name for Saw Diamond Khin).
The donations kept on coming. "Do you still need clothes?" people asked. Honestly, I could collect a truck-full every day for a year and it would not be enough. And so I kept collecting, picking up and organizing the pile of donation growing in my downstairs living room. Until yesterday, when a second large truck full of donations again headed to the Burmese border.
Today, Khun Gyi Gyi sent me the first images from his indigenous Karen mobile medics, who WALK the clothing and bedding donations in through the landmined border regions to remote villages and displaced people.
Do they still need and want donations? YES. Bedding, towels, children's things and smaller sized functional clothing. They ALWAYS need it. Sadly, there is no slowing down of the stream of displaced mostly-stateless people heading toward the Thai Border after more than 60 years of armed conflict and civil war.
The next clothing run I will drive over personally after the immediate Christmas-New Year days, when I go to check the progress of our organic herbal project.
What can one person do? More than you think. It's amazing, when that one person is joined by a helper and another contributor, and the chain grows. TOGETHER we can do soooo much! We haven't clothed the maybe 10,000 freezing cold people sleeping rough, but we have made a difference to several hundred of them. And next week we will do more.
Feeling grateful for the generosity I witness everyday, and blessed to be a conduit for the sharing of abundance that changes and saves lives.
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