When the year started it seemed we were rounding the corner on outlasting covid. Wow, we were all wrong. Now as we enter the second year, we know that even last year’s most pessimistic predictions about how long this pandemic would last were too conservative. Renewed lockdowns, slow vaccine rollout, and rapidly spreading new variants of the disease have rolled back much of the success Thailand had last year. As the death toll continues to rise, the threat of the disease is still very real, and the economic implications make people already teetering on survival extremely vulnerable right now.
For anyone interested to give, we’ll be combining proceeds from our business efforts and your donations to help as many families as possible with rice, cooking oil, and other supplies.
During this time Courageous Kitchen has been offering virtual cooking classes and selling food locally. This has been an unsteady pivot as we’ve struggled to replace the income earned through classes we previously offered to tourists visiting Thailand. For these reasons we’re updating our donation appeals to reflect our need for more support with donations for covid food relief. For anyone interested to give, we’ll be combining proceeds from our business efforts and your donations to help as many families as possible with rice, cooking oil, and other supplies. The cost of these donations each month is $10 per family, and we hope to reach 200 families or more each month.
Our goal is to help people on the border of Thailand and Burma with food supplies. Many of the people there are ineligible for support from the government because they are ethnic minorities without Thai citizenship. With the border closed due to conflict and covid concerns, parents in these families are also without work for the foreseeable future. This month (May 2021) we provided rice, noodles, cooking oil, salt, and other supplies to about 200 families. Of those families, there were about 35 identified as especially vulnerable and they received eggs and fresh produce as well.
Please find and share our new Food Relief donation page with anyone interested to help in our efforts. If you decide to give through Facebook, local banks, or another campaign be sure to let us know or indicate ‘covid relief’ in the notes portion. This will be an ongoing campaign so we’re especially grateful to those assisting by setting up monthly donations. We’ll be talking about these efforts more in our upcoming cooking classes, so we look forward to engage with you there and on Instagram and social media as well. Thank you!
