What others say about us

            What a wonderful joy it was to enter into the various Montessori classrooms at Duang Prateep Foundation.

            I observe all the children engaged in various activities aiding their particular development needs. Children either working alone at mats or in groups at the tables, learning about the Thailand flag or writing numerals. Each child was focused on the materials they had chosen from the shelf, on completing the task, the child gracefully returned the tray or box on the shelf in its rightful place, then returned back to the mat to roll it up with care.

Champion of the poor

Bangkok Post   09/09/07

Rangsita Sirivanich follows a day in the life of Prateep Ungsongtham Hata, the woman who has been hailed as “Slum’s Angel” for her dedication to educating children in Bangkok’s Klong Toey slum area and who is still very actively known as one of Thailand’s top social workers.

Garland maker shows that it's never too late to learn how to use a computer

Story by Jittima Charuwan

Garland maker Raya Taengnagm had never in her life thought of entering computer classes, as the technology seemed out of her reach. Today, she not only knows her way around a computer, she's using it to run her business.

The 38-year-old mother of two generates the family income from the garland business, with regular customer the Banyan Tree Hotel ordering 50 garlands at 10 baht per piece daily as well as some special orders.

For Prateep Ungsongtham Hata, former slum activist and now former senator, the campaign for a better life for the poor continues

Brian Kent

Prateep Ungsongtham Hata began campaigning for the poor when she opened her first kindergarten as a teenager near her home in the dockside slum of Klong Toey.

As a champion of slum children and their families, her work over the following 30 years has received international recognition, and it continued while she was a member of Thailand's first elected Senate.

You've just completed your term as a senator. What did you learn from the experience?

Reprinted with permission from the Wichita State University Alumni Association's THE SHOCKER magazine.

-Kat Schneider

The angel is one of the world's great go-to metaphors: “Touched by an Angel,” Angel Airlines, Angel Island, fallen angel and that most exalted of compliments, “You're an angel.” Los Angeles is a rookie pretender; Bangkok has been celebrated as the “City of Angels” for centuries. So it's not surprising that a remarkable Thai woman named Prateep Ungsongtham has been revered as Bangkok's “Angel of the Slums” for going on 30 years. What is surprising is that she's a former wsu student whose own personal angel, albeit in disguise, was a retired farmer from Newton, Kan., named John Liggett.

This unlikeliest duo of kindred spirits shared not so much a belief as a vision: Education is the key to a better future. A child of Thailand's poverty-besieged Klong Toey slum, Ungsongtham had to leave school when she was 10 because the expense was too great for her family to bear any longer. Over the next five years, she worked at several physically demanding and often dangerous jobs, including packing firecrackers, chipping rust off ships, cleaning the smokestacks of cargo vessels and scavenging the dump for items to resell.

Bangkok Post 07.10.03
The Duang Prateep Foundation is celebrating 25 years of helping the poor and looking to the future in its efforts to improve the quality of life for slum dwellers

Stories by ALONGKORN PARIVUDHIPHONGS

`Once a pauper, always a pauper'' is certainly not Prateep Ungsongtham's motto. Born in the Klong Toey slum in 1952, as a teenager, she worked on the docks to pay her way through teacher?training college. When slum dwellers were threatened with eviction, Prateep put their case to the landowner, the government and the news media. It was a formidable task for a slum girl not yet 20, but she rose to it triumphantly.

Published on Sep 5, 2003

On the 25th anniversary of the Duang Prateep Foundation, its leader reflects on the changes in the Klong Toei slum. The rickety wooden boardwalks have been replaced by concrete paths. There is no more morning walk to get water, as most households are connected to the water mains. Electricity cables are overhead, colour televisions are blaring in many houses and motorcycles snake through narrow alleyway.

So has the situation improved in Klong Toei slum on the 25th anniversary of the Duang Prateep Foundation, the NGO which I founded?

The Nation
Published on Jul 14, 2003

Art is used in Klong Toei to let the children there release tension and relax.

At the end of a walkway on the ground floor of the Duang Prateep Foundation (DPF) building in Klong Toei is a quiet room where slum children gather most evenings after school to draw, paint and mould with Khru Toi.

"Sawas dee khrab, Khru Toi. Sawas dee kha, Khru Toi". Children in their student uniforms one after another walk in from the hallway and greet and wai Khru Toi.

"Today we have a guest," says Toi, one of the founders of the Slum Children's Art club, briefly explaining to her students about my visit.

Bangkok Post 13.02.01

At the Niwattana New Life Project for boys, the drug war is being fought one soul-and body-at a time
Wanphen Sreshthaputra

In the remote countryside of southern Chumphon province, among the forests, coffee plants, rubber trees and ponds which comprise the 39 hectares of the Duang Prateep Foundation's rehabilitation centre, a handful of boys, mostly about 16 years old, are engaged in the titanic struggle to overcome their drug addictions.

They are battling mostly in silence and without gradual drying-out periods or chemical substitutes or medicines, operating on the strength of will with the help of peers, tutors and Mother Nature: a rural environment, fresh water and physical exercise.
The battle is being fought with their own bodies and souls, which have been thoroughly enslaved to narcotic substances, mostly amphetamines, sometimes for years on end.