Standing on Their Own
Story from Thailand, 2025
In 2025, the GCA Thailand staff was alerted by a volunteer in a community we serve that there was a family in a nearby community with four children who needed help. Our team visited the family and began to learn about their situation.
Their father’s work situation was unstable. He worked when he was able, but job opportunities were few and far between. For a young man struggling to provide for his family, this inconsistency is extremely frustrating and leads to consequences; some that are immediate - hunger being one of them, and some that take root after a period of stress- substance abuse and dependency. These consequences pile stress and desperation onto an already difficult situation.
The children’s mother could not leave the young children in order to go to work, so the two older children had begun trying to help their parents to find food and work, even though they were only 14 and 12 years old.
We discovered the young children were consistently going hungry and not attending school. School attendance in Thailand requires tuition, and these children were unable to enroll because their parents simply could not afford to send them. This left them to fend for themselves during the day- searching for food, trying to pass the time.
They were becoming increasingly vulnerable.
GCA continued to interact with this family, building trust through consistency, and we soon had a plan to help support them in their time of need. We discovered that during periods of intense hunger, the children go to a temple in the community to beg for food to eat. Knowing what that must be like for this family to endure, our team sprang into action that would provide immediate relief and help keep them together because we know that children are best protected within a loving, safe family. Our goal here was clear: preserve this family, keep them together, help them get back on their feet.
Our team was able to talk to the parents and came up with a plan: GCA would help meet the children’s nutritional needs by providing dry food support, and we would also be able to cover tuition so that the two older children could return to school.
Our staff went to the school to speak with the teachers and learned that when the two older children were in school previously, they had proved themselves to be diligent students and took their studies seriously. The teachers excitedly welcomed them back in their classrooms!
It was now time for our staff to address the family’s housing situation. We knew that strengthening the layers of protection around them means they need to be part of a loving, supportive community and we knew where to find one. The family agreed to allow us to help them move to a neighborhood where they had better access to other GCA clients and teams so they could more easily attend workshops on parenting, child rights, understanding child development, and child abuse awareness.
A New Beginning on Solid Ground
The change this family has experienced has been life-altering. Their father is healthy and present, he’s holding down a stable job, the children are fed, and the older children attend school everyday and are thriving academically.
The oldest son has this to say to GCA and to you, our partners,
“Thank you so much for helping my family, and allowing us to return to school. We will study hard and work hard to help our family stand on our own.”