26 Children in Patong: How Asia Center Foundation Began

As the walk moves through the Kathu area, I wanted to tell the story of another of the five organisations behind it: Asia Center Foundation, or ACF. I sat down with Roelien, who has led it from the very beginning, to hear how it all started.

It began in the year 2001 almost by accident. Roelien had come to Phuket for a year, working in administration for a project that, in the end, didn't work out the way it was meant to. But by the time it wound down, a foundation had been registered, a piece of paper, and permission to do something official, and Roelien had an idea of what to do with it.

In a poor neighbourhood in Patong, she had seen a particular problem. Many of the children there were the sons and daughters of women who worked long hours, often through the night. During the day, while the mothers slept, no one was looking after the children. Now that the foundation was registered, Roelien had the means to do something official about it: "keep them safe during the day, feed them, and teach them something more than what they had."

So, with a little startup money from an American children's fund, she began. Twenty-six children, in a small two-bedroom house, with one Thai lady who spoke a little English, and Roelien, who at that point had all of three months of Thai. It wasn't much, but it worked. The parents were overjoyed simply to have a safe place for their children to go.

Two years later came the 2004 tsunami. In its aftermath, a British man whose wife had died in the disaster came to Roelien through the Patong Rotary Club, and asked her a question she hadn't really considered: what was her long-term plan? Roelien described her dream: a proper place where children from the poorest families could receive real early childhood education, and support with health and hygiene, the things they were going without. The man asked her to find some land, and of the three plots they found, he bought the most beautiful, the one where ACF still stands today.

Raising the money to build on it took far longer: about eleven years, gathered through every kind of event: people cycling from Bangkok, rugby tournaments, donations kept carefully in a fund. Finally, in 2017, there was enough to build the first centre, the preschool where Roelien and I sat and talked, twenty-five years after those first twenty-six children.

Next in the series: what a day at ACF actually looks like, and what "whole-child care" really means.

Asia Center Foundation supports disadvantaged children in Phuket through early-childhood education, scholarships, and life-skills programmes. To learn more or support their work, visit asiacenterfoundation.org.