Providing a lifeline for Bangkok’s poor during the pandemic

For many thousands of impoverished people, Bangkok Community Help (BCH) has been an absolutely vital lifeline during the past two years of the Covid pandemic.
Set up in April 2020 in response to the obvious and growing need for food and medical supplies in Klong Toey and other low income districts, BCH reaches out to the needy on a daily basis thanks a small army of volunteers and sponsors. Its work has meant the difference between life and death for untold numbers of people in Bangkok and surrounding provinces.
Leading the charge is American businessman Greg Lange and Friso Poldervaart from The Netherlands who jointly founded the project, which has morphed from a small group of like-minded individuals into a complex operation involving hundreds of daily tasks. BCH is now registered as a charity with the Thai government.
Despite their daily proximity to hundreds of Covid sufferers, neither Greg nor Friso has proved positive for any virus.
The scope of their work is staggering. The following statistics tell an amazing story.

Launched April 9, 2020
Operates without a break
Free Covid tests given to over 250 people a day, each receiving a ‘bag of happiness’ filled with groceries toiletries, fruits and other goods
Hands out 3,000 meals a day

* One million kgs of rice
* 1.3 million packets of instant noodles
* 530,000 hot meals
* 840,000 cans of fish
* 210,000 litres of cooking oil
* 630,000 face masks
* 210,000 bars of soap
* 210,000 bottles of shampoo
* 210,000 bottles of alcohol gel
* 5,000 litres of oxygen
* 15,000 ATK tests
* 10,000 strips of paracetamol

Every day across the world at least 7,300 children are abandoned. Just outside Bangkok, there is hope for at least a few of them – thanks to Dr. Cleopandh Soorapanthu, a senior doctor at Bumrungrad Hopistal in Bangkok who runs the Chaiyapruk Foundation for abandoned and abused children in Thailand.
"When you think about how many children are left alone on the street or are born in prisons to drug-addicted mothers, and those who have been abused, you must open your arms and do something," says Dr. Cleopandh, who together with her husband Dr. Somsughi saw a chance to contribute and give some children a happy, safe childhood and an education.
An obstetrician, Dr. Cleopandh is not only a loving mother to her own children, but also a substitute mother to 48 abandoned children.
She was born to a Thai mother and a German father who came to Thailand to teach at Chulalongkorn University, while her mum worked at the US embassy. After her father's passing, her mother decided to move back to Bonn in Germany, where Dr. Cleopandh received her medical education.
For 20 years, she and her husband managed a successful practice in Germany before relocating to Bangkok. Since its launch in 1985, the Chaiyapruk Foundation has grown considerably and today consists of a three-building complex in Nakhon Nayok, north of Bangkok, where it provides the children with love and security.  The kids regard the doctors as their parents.

Bangkok Patana schoolboy Christopher Marsh continued his stellar sailing career recently by winning a well-deserved first place over two-time Thai Olympian Kamolwan Chanyin at the Thailand International Laser Class Association (ILCA) 6 National Championships held at Royal Varuna Yacht Club in Pattaya.
It’s the latest in a long line of successes for the 15-year-old, who moves to UK this September to study for his A levels at Royal Hospital School where he has secured a sailing scholarship.
Christopher, who was only five when he took his first sailing lesson at the RVYC and eight when he won his first race, is having a very busy year. As a member of the 2021-22 RYA Laser Radial Youth Performance team, he trained with his teammates at Weymouth in the UK before travelling onto Abu Dhabi for the 2022 Asian Sailing Championships where he competed for the first time in the ILCA 7.
     Last month he returned to the UK for the Youth Nationals, followed in July by four back-to-back ILCA 6 events - Youth Europeans in Thessalonica, Greece, Youth Worlds in Hague, The Netherlands, UK Nationals at Hayling Island, and then the Youth Worlds in Texas, USA.  
     August will see the Thai-English teenager back to training, including two weeks in Gran Canaria sailing with Tamas Eszes, Sailing Academy. 
The future certainly looks bright for Christopher. His father Stephen says the Yacht Racing Association of Thailand has developed an Olympic program for the youngster for the 2028 Olympics, but he will try for Paris Olympics in 2024.
     An avid sailor who competes or trains every weekend and all school holidays, Stephen is a regular at his home base of the RVYC where he is supported by his father, mother Kittiwara, and younger brother William, another up and coming sailor.

Bangkok's Infrastructure

Don’t forget that this is the Land of Mai Pen Rai, a concept, we used to say, which is similar to the Spanish Manana, but without conveying the same sense of urgency.

​We put up with certain difficulties which were more inconveniences than deprivations. Potable water pumping stations and electricity-generating plants were bombed by the Allies during the war. Thus, running water from the tap for more than a couple of hours a day was a luxury. All drinking water had to be boiled.
Since the water pressure was always low, water pumps were necessary to get water to the second floor of your house and above. So, when the water flowed, you filled up bathtubs, ongs, water tanks, buckets and whatever containers were available, not knowing when the water would flow again.
Electricity supply was inconsistent with frequent brown-outs and blackouts rotating through various parts of the city. Every house and office had ‘step-up’ transformers to boost the voltage of whatever inconsistent electricity trickled in. Sometimes it would go off at untimely moments.
In the summer of 1955, I was incapacitated by appendicitis and was taken to the Bangkok Adventist Hospital for an operation. Just as I was being wheeled to the operating theater, the lights went out. So, instead of using an elevator, I swung myself off the gurney, walked down two flights of stairs, marched into the operating room and literally climbed up onto the operating table. An emergency generator in the hospital supplied lighting for the surgeons to do their bit. However, the anesthetist couldn’t see too well for the spinal he was giving me and I ended up with 25+ years of periodically debilitating headaches.
The telephone system was archaic even for that era. Old black Bakelite rotary phones, heavy as could be, little was automated. Phone lines, with only five-digit numbers, took many months to get and often were out of service. One of the reasons for the appalling situation was no competition for the government monopoly, TOT. About 28,000 subscribers and for every 10 phone lines there were 11-12 paying customers, and they were not party lines. This meant that someone’s phone was always out of order, unless you paid the repairman a stipend to keep you on line.
To make an overseas call, that could only be done from booths at the General Post Office on New Road or the then new Erawan Hotel (which opened in 1956). Both required advance booking of several hours to several days. Teletype was still very new and not really available commercially. Fax machines were about 20 years off in the future.
So businesses used cable addresses for international radio-telegrams inbound from overseas and outbound. Ours was LYMAN, BANGKOK. Since charges for outgoing messages were by the letter or word, messages were short and cryptic, sometimes using commercial codes which provided combinations of a few letters to equal whole phrases or template sentences. Foreign airmail took 4-12 days to get to addresses in Europe and the US; sea mail (surface mail) took 1-3 months. Domestic mail and telegraph were quite efficient.

B​y the time I was 30 years old, I had worked for a few years as a doctor in the hospital. Leading up to that time, I had moved to New Zealand in 1986 and met the man who is now my husband in Hong Kong in 1987. I moved back to London to complete training as a general practitioner and completed the exams in 1989.
In early February 1990, I left London for the long trip to Bangkok, after spending a few days in Delhi with my friend Clare and her aunt. It was usual for a flight to stop in at least one country before reaching Thailand, so I chose India. Soon I said goodbye to Clare and went to the airport. I had a purple suit on, so the other passengers thought I was with Thai Airways.
After waiting for two hours, we were told the flight arriving had a problem, and we would not leave Delhi that night. Ground staff gave us hotel vouchers for two per room and told us to match with other passengers. As it turned out, I shared the room with a young male Indian Fijian. Probably nowadays you wouldn't be allowed to share rooms like that, or you would have insisted on one room per person!
I was moving to Thailand to be with Ian, who was working as a roads engineer, back when they built all the expressways here. I was so happy to see him when I arrived. We stayed at the Rich Inn on Sukhumvit 53. Back then, there was a shortage of accommodations for foreigners looking for apartments and houses in the Sukhumvit area. I remember the walls moving with the thunder of traffic that went on all night.
I signed on for some classes at the AUA (a Thai language school where you learn by listening to people speak), and Ian had bought me some learn-about-Thai-culture books. I visited one or two NGOs, and I stayed busy at the weekends exploring the city. One week I even visited Kanchanaburi.
During that first year I think I became quite down. One Monday morning, it hit me, "What was I doing here in Bangkok"? I guessed the honeymoon was over, and it hit me that everything was so different here. I got really overwhelmed, looking at what I had done, coming to this strange place. Surprisingly, though I thought maybe Hong Kong or Singapore would be easier places to practise as a doctor, I never once thought of leaving and going back to the UK.

Best known as Pattaya’s premier family tourist attraction, visited by up to 10,000 people a day, Nong Nooch is also regarded as one of the world’s most significant botanical gardens, thanks to Anders Lindstrom, a constant presence in the park

F​or more than three decades, a lavishly bearded 50-year-old botanist from Sweden called Anders Lindstrom has quietly beavered away at Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden, helping it to win prestigious awards at the Chelsea Flower Show while also putting Thailand at the forefront of the quest to preserve and protect the world’s plants.
Although far better known as a family entertainment venue on a super-grand scale, Nong Nooch devotes more than half of its 500 acres to nurseries for the cultivation of some 12,000 species, making it one of the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world.
They include rare and near-extinct species as well as an unrivalled inventory a an almost complete collection of cycads and over 900 species of palms and over 300 varieties of bougainvillea along with virtually every other plant seen in Thailand.
Working in tandem with Nong Nooch’s owner Mr Kampon Tansacha, this deeply committed Swede has been a constant influence on the project’s development and stature over the past 30 years. From numerous visits to many other tropical countries, he has brought back all kinds of tropical plants previously unknown here, and exchanged plants with many of the world’s leading botanical gardens - and all the while stored seeds and pollen and gathered valuable information that will help preserve these most precious of resources for future generations.

After a stellar career in the bone-crunching sport of women’s football in the United States, Thai-Australian beauty Salinee Jayne Caldwell is using her retirement from Gridiron to launch a fitness guide aimed at midsized women.
Now living in Bangkok, Jayne has teamed up with fellow pro-footballer Quincy Hewitt from New Zealand to launch an app called YA BISH that offers all kinds of health and fitness tips for women who are “lean on top and thicker below” – specifically those sized between 10 and 14, and aged 18 to 45, explains Jayne, who set pulses racing when she appeared on front cover of The BigChilli back in December 2018.
Jayne and Quincy see the move into the online fitness industry as a logical step after their professional sporting life. “We worked with a certified personal trainer to pull out the favorite workouts from our playing days to suit our target market. The challenge was to create something that is not only different but better than anything currently available,” says Jayne. “So we hit a demographic that has been completely neglected – midsized women. As professional athletes, it legitimizes the project.”