“My ride on an elephant was the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me”, said a 10-year-old orphan after a SET for Society visit to an elephant training camp. “I’ve never left the orphanage before and I was happy for every moment of the camp, except when we had to leave. Then I cried”.

The program is remarkably successful. After being introduced at Rajabhat University in Nakhon Sawan in 2002, interest quickly spread to other schools and colleges from which SET’s students are drawn. Nearly 400 students from two universities, three colleges and a high school are now involved in the various annual projects. The program will expand in 2009 to include another university and another 100 students. Students take part voluntarily but all are very enthusiastic to do so.

Another project is to take a party of children from an orphanage in Nakhon Sawan on a special trip each year. The children are accompanied and cared for by older SET scholarship students who act as their 'brothers and sisters'. Groups of children have stayed overnight at an elephant training camp in the north of Thailand, have made a one-day visit to places of interest in Bangkok and have spent the day at the seaside. After one visit, the orphanage director wrote: "I want to say thank you to SET for taking our children on a visit to Bangkok. The children had a wonderful time and saw many things they had previously only seen on television. The trip was not only exciting for them, it was also very instructive and they learned a lot about Thailand's history and religion, as well as about animals and birds from many parts of the world. People think our children have sad lives because they have no parents, but they are not without love. All of us at the orphanage give them as much love as we can. Thank you that you also give them so much care and affection".

A SET vocational college student helps an elderly resident of an old people’s home during a SET for Society visit.	A new friend: a SET high school student helps care for a young resident of a local orphanage. Some students also visit the orphanage in their own time.

The Rajabhat Project

"Thank you for giving us the opportunity to show that we also care about other people in our society".  Rajabhat project team leader

SET awards scholarships to 200 students at Rajabhat University in Nakhon Sawan. They are particularly enthusiastic about the SET for Society Program. Their projects to renovate and improve remote, rural primary schools become more ambitious every year. The students organize every aspect of the projects themselves, including budgeting. That greatly increases their sense of personal responsibility to the project.

The projects are held during the long summer break and usually last ten days and nights, with the students living at the school during that time. Earlier in the year, a student team surveys several primary schools and selects one for the project. The school must be in need of improvement and the project must be of direct benefit to the children who study there. In keeping with the developing Rajabhat tradition, the project must also be very labor-intensive and a challenge to the work-team. Hundreds of students volunteer to take part each year but the work-team is restricted to about 50-75 students who can offer the most practical skills.

Over the past seven years, the students have settled on a specific type of project. A former project leader explains: “All the little primary schools we renovate were built around the same time to the same general specification, to serve small rural communities. They all now need the same type of improvement. Such schools didn’t usually include facilities for the children to eat their lunch or for staff to cook for them, so in the past few years we’ve been building canteens. We also usually improve the children’s toilets. They’re often horrible but very easy to improve with new tiling, paint and lighting. Most of the schools also have run-down play areas with broken or unsafe equipment. Again, that’s a simple and inexpensive thing to improve. This year our project included all three aspects – canteen, toilets and play area - so it was something of a classic project.

“The great thing about our projects is the way they have continuity from one year to the next amongst the work- team. Many students have worked on several projects, so we have a lot of accumulated experience rolling on from year to year. That’s very valuable because we need to know not just basic building techniques, like mixing concrete and block building, but also plastering, welding, carpentry, tiling, plumbing, wiring and painting. We have that experience now, so even the very complex metal framework for the canteen roof we built this year didn’t cause us any great problems because we’ve made similar roofs in the past. Because we have the experience, we don’t usually need to spend money on professional advice or help, but we will if it’s for a job we’ve never tackled before. We try to keep the cost of our projects to about a third of what it would cost to have them built professionally. A big part of the cost of any building is in labor, but of course we give our labor voluntarily.

“I know that what we build are not mega constructions but that isn’t the important thing to us and it isn’t the point of our projects. The point is for us SET scholarship students to give something to other disadvantaged people in our society; voluntarily and with a good heart. In our case, we work to improve the educational environment for little children. We think that’s important and it’s why we always do the very best we can”.

In 2005, Rajabhat students built this combined canteen, activities hall and classroom at a tiny rural school which is run as a charity for children from the local farming community.

The SET for Society Program is sponsored by a donation to SET from the BCTFN (The British Community in Thailand Foundation for the Needy).