Heading to Phuket, Thailand tomorrow for a little over a year.
I am so excited to share the journey with my wonderful friends and am so lucky to have spent my last night with my family and some lovely ladies.
I am going to really concentrate on, and work on, my health, cooking and recipes, aromatherapy, vegetable patch (^_^), work in Vietnam and my wonderful boyfriend…
this place was once the home of hundreds of my friends in vietnam.
in case it’s not clear… that is a garbage dump.
people… from birth to 80 years old… lived and worked here every day…
simply to survive. simply to provide for their family.
people… who have strength, dignity, and love unlike…
— Deepak Chopra (via nirvikalpa)
MAKING WAVES WITH MUAY THAI
(I will follow this post with some videos and photos and more information.)
Recently, Kai and I went to Vietnam, to the Catalyst school it teach a self-deence workshop.
The girls of Rach Gia are now muay thai champions in the making. In our absence, these invaluable skills are still being practiced and perfected.
It was an absolutely amazing experience to hold pads for these tiny girls and surprising just how powerful they were! By the end of our week, our group of the 40 most at risk girls were throwing elbows, knees, punches and kicks.
We made sure that they all understood where and when this self-defence was appropriate to use and acted extremely responsibly. Young girls who had been raped and beaten were approaching our muay thai lessons with such happiness and dedication, whilst understanding that these skills could save their lives.
My wonderful friend, Lauren, who was working in Rach Gia wrote the following about my self-defence workshop:
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“The International Labor Orgnization maintains that nearly 1.3 million people are trafficked into forced labor in Asia alone.
Due to the vulnerability of the children in our community because of extreme poverty, girls in our communtiy, ages 6-17, are at great risk of being trafficked—specifically, into the sex slave industry in Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and Thailand.
In a society where girls are taught to willingly submit to any man that tries to take them, we must teach these girls differently—they are not a consumable item and do not deserve to be serviced to men daily for the rest of their life, but rather, they are strong, deserving of a great future, and have dignity.
Despite many measures that we have already put in place and successful steps forward in our daily fight against trafficking for our girls, there is still a great deal of work to be done to protect them.
This has led to a recent colloboration beween Catalyst Foundation Vietnam and Dragon Muay Thai Gym, Phuket, Thailand, to provide a self-defense workshop to our community, specifically to our girls.
Jess Boyd, one of our great volunteers with Catalyst Foundation, has devoted her time and energy into training and developing her skills in Muay Thai in order to return to Kien Giang and teach our girls this fighting as a form of self defense and protection against any potential traffickers.
Furthermore, as these girls learn these physical skills, they will also grow in self confidence and internal sense of secrurity. Jess, and professional Muay Thai trainer, Danai Yotakong, came to Rach Gia for the first ‘Muay Thai Self Defense Workshop’ in March and trained 40 of our girls in extremely valuable self defense skills. They were amazed by how natural the girls were and how quickly they learned—and at their strength!
With the success of this first workshop, it has become even more apparent of what a vital set of skills this is for our girls and it is our hope that we can continue to provide this training more frequently and on an annual basis. It is with your support that we can help empower our girls and community and give them a set of defense skills that will help keep them strong and safe throughout their everyday lives.”
Help us continue the workshop here: http://www.crowdrise.com/muaythai
http://www.catalystfoundation.org/
