We are currently facing a very severe funding shortage of 18 million Thai Baht (US $600,000 or £360,000 approx) and urgently need your support in helping us run our key services until the end of the year.

Despite the recent changes in Burma, we have yet to see a fall in patient numbers or a decrease in the number of children seeking protection and education. The continuing need for vital health and education services for the border community is evident, but it is becoming more of a struggle to raise the funds needed to continue our activities. We have not received enough donations to cover our funding needs in 2012, which will unfortunately lead to cuts in staff and services unless we receive further support.

In June, just days before World Refugee Day, the clinic held a series of emergency meetings to decide on measures that would minimise the funding shortfall. It was agreed that, effective immediately, staff would receive a 20% cut to their stipend. This will be very hard for everyone when our staff’s average salary is only 4000 baht (approximately £75) per month.

We will also have to reduce the number of staff at Mae Tao Clinic, which is also very distressing; Mae Tao Clinic is not just a workplace for our staff, it is also a home. 95% of our staff are displaced people from Burma.

We are also going to have to reduce our services; this may include any non-essential services and any non-emergency referrals. We are currently also very worried that we will be unable to continue providing dry food rations to the 3,000 unaccompanied children staying in boarding houses.

If there were genuine change in Burma, we would see fewer patients, since Burmese government hospitals would be fully equipped to deal with our caseload and provide affordable health services. We would no longer have such large numbers of unaccompanied children, separated from their families in order to access education or to escape from the threats of forced labour.

Until the day there is genuine peace in Burma and the government can provide quality health and education to all of its people, Mae Tao Clinic will continue serve those in need. But we really need more support to do this. To make a donation, please visit our donate page. Please also pass this urgent message on to your friends and family.

CDC School has a link with Campie School. As you can read below, our friends at CDC School have a crisis. They have no more funding to pay for the children who have no parents so live in the school boarding houses. Campie School give money every year to CDC and we are taking cash there next week, which will help a little. Please consider giving to this desperate need. Sheila

Mae Tao Clinic urgently needs your help. Due to a recent change in our funding, we no longer have money to continue providing dry food rations to around 3,000 displaced children staying in boarding houses around Mae Sot. If we don’t receive emergency funding or provisions soon, we will have to stop our Dry Food Programme as soon as next week.

The impact on the children staying in the affected boarding houses is likely to be devastating. Many of these boarding houses do not receive any support other than the Dry Food Programme, and will be forced to close. Children will have to move to other boarding houses, where capacity and funding is already overstretched, or they will have to drop out of school and move back to their villages in Burma, where they may not have the opportunity to continue their education and face other risks.

We need your support to help tide us over until we can find alternative funding for this programme. We’re collecting donations of rice, oil, tinned fish and beans, as well as monetary donations. It costs 300 baht a month to provide one child with minimal dry food rations.

If you want to donate money, but are not currently in Mae Sot, you can make a donation online via http://maetaoclinic.org/​how-to-help/donate/

Time is of the essence here, so please if you can, make a donation this week and pass this message onto anyone who can help. We cannot express desperately enough how awful it would be for the students who depend on our dry food rations if this vital programme was stopped. Thanks.

In 2005 the City of Edinburgh gave Aung San Suu Kyi the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh and my journey to Mae Sot and Burma began. At Forthview Primary, we had just finished a whole school study of Buddhism. Edinburgh schools were invited to take part in the celebrations. I didn’t even (to my shame) know who Aung San Suu Kyi was but clearly she was Buddhist and so that fitted really well with our school learning. We signed up to take part in etching workshops by Chris Robinson, an Anglo-Burmese artist, who had been commissioned to make an etching to celebrate the event. (I’ll post that later.) Chris linked us with Hle Bee School for Burmese refugees in Mae Sot. Murray Forgie, then Edinburgh’s International Development Officer for Education supported us to apply for a UK DfID Global School Partnership between Forthview and Hle Bee and the birth of the 3 Global School Partnerships between Scottish and Burmese refugee schools began. You can read about these on
www.forthview.blogspot.co.uk
www.pirniehall.blogspot.co.uk
www.campieburma.blogspot.co.uk

So please join us on Tuesday night to celebrate that Aung San Suu Kyi has finally been able to receive her Nobel Peace Prize herself. And also to hear about the difficulties the ethnic peoples of Burma still face in their fight for justice and self governance.

6.30pm at Edinburgh Council Headquarters in Market Street. Email your name to burma@celloandpiano.com

See you there, I hope.