Summer Boothbay residents and Friends of Thai Daughters co-founders Jane McBride and Patty Zinkowski hosted a reunion and tour of the Friends of Thai Daughters program in Northern Thailand in January.

Boothbay-based Friends of Thai Daughters provides room, board, education and emotional support to young girls in Northern Thailand at high risk of being trafficked.

McBride and Zinkowski were joined by Boothbay residents Marty and Frank Helman who were representing the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation and Julie Lamy who joined Friends of Thai Daughters in 2014 after years with Boothbay Region Land Trust.

Zinkowski and Friends of Thai Daughters Housemother and program graduate, Mee, organized a full itinerary. First and foremost, everyone was able to visit the current Friends of Thai Daughters safe house, the Sunflower House. The Sunflower House is home to Mee and six K-12 program participants affectionately referred to as “daughters.”

Daughters is a much more appropriate term since the Friends of Thai Daughters program feels more like a family than an NGO program. Daughters currently enrolled in college or recently graduated joined the reunion at the Sunflower House.

Second on the itinerary was a visit to a potential new site for a permanent Sunflower House, which could house up to 15 K-12 girls per year. It was a particularly sweet bonus for the Helmans to have an opportunity to visit this site since a Walter Foundation grant might make the acquisition possible. In 2014, The Walter Foundation awarded Friends of Thai Daughters a grant to buy or build a permanent safe house to reach more K-12 girls each year and sustain the program through home ownership.

Following a reunion of “daughters,” young and old, the Boothbay crew and the Friends of Thai Daughters family headed out on the road to visit historical Friends of Thai Daughters sites and tourist destinations.

The road trip included a visit to the Burmese border; the Golden Triangle where Burma, Laos and Thailand meet; the Akha hill tribe villages of Friends of Thai Daughters daughters; a special trip to an elephant refuge, and a very emotional return to Doi Luang, the small village where McBride and Zinkowski first found young children in need of help in 2002.

All in all, the reunion and road trip included 15 girls and young women who have been part of the Friends of Thai Daughters program.

For more information on Friends of Thai Daughters and to see more photos from the Chiang Rai trip, visit www.friendsofthaidaughters.org or email julie@friendsofthaidaughters.org.