Thai Flooding: Kru Nam is back on the road
Kru Nam and her team will be back on the road by the time this reaches you.
Pua District, Nan Province, Thailand
I’ve known Kru Nam almost twenty years. She’s the reason Not For Sale started working in Thailand in the first place. She understands Northern Thailand (and its neighbors Myanmar and Laos) better than anyone I know: which roads will hold up in the rains, which families can’t wait for anyone else to show up.
Chiang Rai and Nan Provinces are flooding. Kru Nam’s team didn’t wait for anyone’s permission to start moving. Like always, she acted.
Right now that looks like this: she’s buying all the supplies within our means, collecting what’s been donated, packing it into bags, and getting it to families by truck where the roads have held and by boat where they have not.
She sent me this yesterday, from Pua District, inside Nan Province:
“We are currently in Pua District. The merit-making vehicle has finished repairs, and we are preparing for the next mission: another hundred bags. We need to reach the forest monastery, Wat Pa Phuket, tonight. Alright, let’s hit the road.”
Flooding doesn’t pause the things that put children at risk. It speeds them up. Families lose income. Kids stop going to school. People end up somewhere unfamiliar, which is exactly where traffickers lurk. This is why disaster response and trafficking prevention have never been two separate jobs for us. They’re one important act.
$1,500 covers a run like tonight’s: gas for the boats and truck, and the materials that go in the bags.
If you’re able to help, the response window for this campaign closes Saturday, August 29.
Mark Wexler
Mark Wexler is Co-Founder and CEO of Not For Sale and a longtime builder of alternatives to the systems that enable modern-day slavery and ecocide.
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