The Federation for Education and Development (FED)

Since I haven’t said much about what I’m doing in KhukKhak, maybe now on my involuntary day off (they had nothing for me to do yet at the office, so here I am at home at 11 AM on a Friday with plenty of blogging time!) I can actually provide some insight into FED.

I am volunteering at the Federation for Education and Development (FED), based in KhukKhak, Thailand. The organization was originally formed in 2000(ish) under the name Grassroots Human Rights and Education (GHRE) but when it became a Thai organization in 2005 the term “human rights” had to be edited from the title for legal reasons (a fact I found quite interesting, but could not get much more info about when I asked). After the tsunami hit in December 2004 GHRE moved from it’s previous location in northern Thailand near the border with Burma (now Myanmar) to the southwestern coast of Thailand to aid Burmese migrants living in this coastal area. The organization remains in KhukKhak today, and they have developed a considerable presence in the Phang-Nga province over the past 6+ years.

Interesting information about FED will come out bit by bit in my blog as I become more situated here, but for the time being I will just include the link to their website: http://www.ghre.org/en/. (The first two articles you see on the home page were clumsily edited by me on Wednesday-- from very broken English into slightly more fluent English (to the best of my ability given the illogical phrases I was handed), my first and as of yet only job at FED)

FED does some really interesting work with Burmese migrants, and most knowledge I have thus far on this work will show in my next blog post about my community visit to Khok Kloi and surrounding areas yesterday.