Canada Sponsors Portable School Project in Thailand

This summer marked the opening of the first portable school in Tambon Prakasa Mai, Thailand. The school is a wooden structure providing basic education and health care to a camp of migrant construction workers.

Many in the community, composed mainly of northeastern Thai, Cambodians, Mon and Burmese, have no papers and speak no Thai, and have little or no access to state educational and medical facilities. Without a daycare system, female workers are obliged to bring their children to dangerous and polluted construction sites.

Designed and built off-site at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi and reconstructed near the camp, the portable school functions as a classroom and nursery for children during their parents’ work hours, as well as providing adult instruction in health and construction safety. An attached clinic provides basic medical services. Staffed primarily by residents of the camp, the school represents a simple, sustainable solution to the pressing need for health care and education in the precarious and transient migrant worker community.

The portable school is a project undertaken by the Centre for Architecture & Human Rights (CAHR), a Canadian non-profit organization dedicated to promoting a rights-based approach to architecture and development through alternative education, research, monitoring and advocacy.

Canada provided support to the portable school project through the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives in Thailand. Steven Rheault-Kihara, a Counsellor at the Embassy of Canada in Bangkok, was joined at the opening by representatives from The Lighthouse Club, the Mercy Centre and the Building and Wood Workers’ International, co-sponsors of the project, as well as the directors of CAHR and members of the community.