One day I heard two visitors talking in the temple grounds. They complained that Thai monks seemed to do nothing but sleep, unlike missionaries who went to Thailand and worked very hard to help Thai people. I was disturbed that they seemed to have very little understanding of Thailand and Thai monks, but their remarks were to bear fruit.


The next time I was in Thailand I took Peter Robinson to the village in Isarn where I was born, and we discussed how we could best help children in need in Thailand. When we came back to the UK we set up the Anglo-Thai Foundation. We thought carefully about what we could do for the poor in Thailand and decided to raise funds to finance a well to provide the village with clean water, a community hall, extra land for the school so that the children could breed fish for food. We built a small kindergarten for pre-school children, and paid for lunch for all the children in the school. We also built a kuti (cells) for the monks to live in. At first we made occasional hardship grants to make sure that even the poorest children should be able to study at school, and we hoped to be able to help them with their studies in the future. We found a teacher who wrote to schools in many different villages to ask which children were most in need of financial help, and in the UK we found generous sponsors.

I suppose the real reason behind this charity was that I myself came from a very poor family and had only three years of primary school. I always felt sad that I had not been able to study more in childhood and, as charity begins at home, I wanted to help other children in my village who were in the same situation. With time we were able to expand our work to other provinces, and now help students in Buriram, Surin, Ubon Rachatani, Kalasin and Khon Kaen, although most of our pupils are still from Sisaket.

The children are chosen by the head teachers of their schools and we support them from primary level through secondary school and on, if they make the grade, to college and university.