Let them eat fruit

We are home to 40 really cute, really energetic and therefore always hungry kids, ages 5 to 18. Our kids, like all kids everywhere these days, love chips and sweet stuff, but they also love fruit. So we want to surround them with fruit. Fruit trees everywhere! Pomegranates, figs, mangosteens and durian, bananas, rambutan, mangos, and lychees. These trees fruit in different seasons. With your help, our kids can eat their way through one fruit after the other!

We just finished the mango season. The kids stripped our few mango trees bare. The instant they were out of the school buses it was a pell-mell rush across the fields to see who could climb fastest and pick the most green mangos. Warm Heart is a small community development organization serving the rural poor in mountainous Thailand. Unlike other NGOs,we are located right here in the country in a village of 175 people.

We did not arrive with a mission but started by asking people what they thought their problems were. After a year of asking, we started our first programs.Today we run a Children's Home for 40 kids, a job creation program for illiterate, landless women, a sustainable agriculture program and a public health program for the elderly and disabled. Our kids are minority children from villages without schools and most are very at-risk. (Happy, normal kids who are just dirt poor we send to a partner school; we keep the tough kids.) Such total joy is a thing to see.

Will you plant a fruit tree so our kids can eat more fruit?
The trees we have now were planted by friends from betterplace.org three years ago. Even though they are just starting to bear, the kids love caring for them and picking their fruit when it's ripe. Your tree will be making kids happy in just three years, too.

The event
Saturday and Sunday are for school, laundry and chores like cleaning the cow pen and weeding. Planting fruit trees will be such a treat! We will send you photos.

The cost
A two-year-old sapling that will yield fruit in just 3 years cost 12€.

Our children's wish list: 12 Persimmons, 2 Pomegranates, 4 Figs, 6 Mangosteens, 6 Rambutan, 6 Durian, 35 Bananas. 3 different types at 2 €

The impact
In 3 years these trees will begin to yield - 15 or 20 pieces each. But in 10 years they will be yielding hundreds of pieces and even our kids will not be able to eat them all!

It is hard to quantify how much this fruit will do for our kids, but it will be a lot. They all come from very poor families and arrived at Warm Heart malnourished. The vitamins and micronutrients they can get from fruit cannot make up for what they missed as infants, but they can ensure that our kids go to school every day ready to learn and play hard. When this happens, we hope to be able to help the older children create a small business to sell their extra fruit in local markets where many of these fruits never appear.

This project is supported by the Maecenata Foundation, Munich/Berlin:

https://support.betterplace.org/hc/de/articles/6106004149404-Was-ist-Maecenata-