Please watch this high-spirited holiday message from our Mercy children.

It's Christmas in the Slums of Klong Toey and we have really tried all year to find the moms and dads of our abandoned kids who make Mercy 'their home' the only home they remember. They want to know of their beginnings - to have the memories no matter how heart-breaking or unpleasant so that they too can 'tell their own stories' to return somewhere that was once home, even for a moment. It's been unbelievably difficult locating remote rural villages; locating lost and not wanting to be found moms and dads, but we've succeeded a lot...

On behalf of all our children, house moms, house dads, teachers, cooks, social workers, and everyone here at Mercy Centre, we wish to thank you for your friendship and support in 2010.

This past Monday, December 13^th, HRH Princess Srirasmi, the Royal Patroness of the Human Development Foundation, celebrated her birthday with the children of Mercy Centre.

Galong was in his mid-20s, living on the street, and working as a “doorman” at a bar near the Pratunam market when we found him fifteen years ago. Born with a kind of Downs’ Syndrome, he could speak only a few words, and unfortunately they weren’t the ones he needed to explain where he came from or how he came to live by himself in the most crowded neighborhood in Bangkok.

This Wednesday the world will mark World Aids Day. Observed on the first of December each year since 1987, the day is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. Between 1981 and 2007, AIDS has killed more than 25 million people and there an estimated 33 million people living with HIV, thousands of those are children. In Bangkok's slum community of Klong Toey, sixty children are all HIV positive are cared for at the Mercy clinic, many of them are orphaned or abandoned.