A boy holds up an orange during a maths class at the orchard day school. Photo © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

I was in Chiang Mai district last week, introducing a group of Thai bloggers to UNICEF-supported projects for marginalised children. After our visit to the orchard night school (see part one of this blog), we went to see a day school in the same area. We got up early and set off in our vans for an orange orchard outside Fang town. We drove through wide paddy fields, criss-crossed by irrigation canals and filled with a host of yellow grass blades glistening in the morning sun. Here and there, women in straw hats were working in the fields, breaking the earth with wooden hoes. The landscape was layered: beyond the rice fields was a line of low trees that marked the start of the orchards. Behind them, craggy mountains rose up with forested flanks. It was a beautiful scene, but Fang is not a tourist destination. Instead, it’s the centre of a sometimes harsh agricultural industry.

Continue reading “Fruits of labour: schools for migrant children” →

Children at the orchard day school in Fang, Chiang Ma. Photo © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Thailand is rightly famous for the quality of its fruit. The sois (small streets) where I live in Bangkok’s Aree neighbourhood are lined with stalls selling oranges, dragon fruit, mangos and whatever else is in season. The brightly coloured fruit is piled up on mobile trailers: fresh, plentiful and cheap. But this abundance comes at a price. As we discovered during a trip to Chiang Mai province in the north of the country, many of Thailand’s fruit orchards are staffed by low-paid migrant workers, whose children rarely get to go to school.

Continue reading “Evening class: visiting Thailand's orchard schools” →