When we first met a poor ten-year-old girl named Oraya, we didn’t know she was exceptional. She didn’t appear much different from the countless bedraggled street kids we meet every day. Oraya came from a broken home, and ended up in the care of an Aunt, a street food vendor, who could not afford to keep her niece in school. 

Please join us for a Gala Dinner to celebrate the 88th birthday of His Majesty The King of Thailand Monday - December 7, 2015 Grand Hyatt Hotel 123 Collins Street Melbourne

A poor five-year-old Cambodian girl named Panda says in perfect Thai: “This morning I studied English. Now I am solving multiplication problems. I love coming to school! My teacher, Kru Rat, teaches me new things every day."

Way, way back, even before we opened our Mercy Centre, we had a dream for our children in the slums beside the slaughterhouse – a simple-but-profound dream shared by all the moms, dads, and community and religious leaders: we dreamed that we would send all our slaughterhouse children to school.

The "three grandmothers" is the most famous story in the old part of the slum known as the Klong Toey slaughterhouse. The kindergarten kids love the story and ask the teacher over and over to "tell us again" before their afternoon nap at school.

The sacred tree is a mysterious thing to many, but not to a group of six- and seven-year-old orphans in Bangkok’s biggest slum