The work
Hot, Northern ThailandBlue Skies Home.
Baan Fah Sighy means Blue Skies Home. Children who were abandoned or orphaned have been raised there, and the ones raised first are adults now.
Hot, in Northern Thailand, with a second household in Chiang Mai.
What happens here
They were raised as a family.
Babies and small children came in with nowhere else to go. They grew up in one household, went to school, and had the ordinary things a childhood is made of.
The ones raised first are working or studying now. One of the eldest daughters married, and the family got together for the wedding. They still come back.
Who runs it
The same two people, the whole way through.
Phil and Wanida Hohnen
They took in the first child when the home opened, and they have been the parents of that household ever since. Phil is in his seventies and still has a house full of teenagers.
What they carry now
The young adults need more support, not less. Work in Thailand without further education pays very little, so the ones who want to keep studying need help to do it.
Where this sits
Alongside the schools.
The schools are for children who have families around them. Blue Skies Home was for the ones who did not. The young adults who grew up here are studying and working now, the same as the students coming out of the schools.
The schools on the border, and the jungle schools further in.
Photographs
EAI's own pictures, used as shot.