Written by our Thailand Team
Community clean-ups and tree planting.
As a hub, the Thai team planned to complete a community clean up at least once per month. However, due to COVID restrictions, we have been unable to do this the past few months. Lockdown restrictions have now eased for people living in Thailand, so, we were able to join a public health group doing a community cleanup at the end of July. The same day, we also worked on our goal of reducing our carbon emissions by planting 50 tree saplings around Mae Sariang. This helped offset 25 tonnes of carbon emissions!
Waste management research.
Proper waste management is a large issue in Thailand and we started thinking – how can we help our partners to address this issue? If we don’t make changes, the environment will suffer. Through our research, we found that people know how to separate waste but they are lacking the discipline to continue. Our research is looking at how we can make proper waste management a long term project and increase good habits. We hope our partners will gain good skills and overall better waste management in the long run.
Developing our first-aid training.
The purpose of this research is for us to know what kind of First Aid training lessons the Thai government provides for people interested in first response. We will use this information when we deliver Paramedic related health programs and will enable us to support community to access health care faster.
We hope to help support and deliver the first aid training for local community staff who normally run local events and would benefit from having first aid training in case of an emergency. As they are not trained nurses or doctors, this training allows them to help support emergency services without full medical training.
In order to support emergency rescue and first aid, we want to have a first response Centre in the hill-tribe communities run by community members and local staff to rescue people in the hill-tribes before they are transferred to the hospital. The hill – tribes do have a Public health Centre but are low in staff and so community trained first aid responders would help a lot.
Providing FREE training to them will increase their confidence to help in an emergency and ultimately support the emergency services. If we can help train the community then they can help other people with more confidence and knowledge.