Dear Friends:

Happy New Year!

1. Our bakery is now complete, ready for placing assistance into the villages that have the greatest nutritional problems due to forced relocations and the taking of their farming lands by forestry.

Any donations to this project now go directly to buy flour and other baking supplies.

2. Akha villagers near Fang on the road to Mae Suai are telling that the Forestry department is arresting them for cutting brush that has grown up on land that they paid for and which they cycle every three to four years for growing rice. These villages are quite isolated, and the forestry alternates the areas where it applies this kind of pressure. Forestry people are armed with M-16 machine guns while making these arrests of villagers who are farming their own land.

3. Remaining Infrastructure Projects.

A. Pay off the printing press.
B. Finish the well and fish tank project.
C. Finish Repair on Truck.

All other costs now boil down to supplies needed for each project once the initial investment for the equipment is completed.

Truck repair bill is down to $1000 now. The truck has been out of service for two months.

Please help with this if you at all can.

4. We have an article in Tai Culture Journal Dec. 2000 Issue.

5. Meeh Paw was an Akha Baby Girl who was ill and mishandled by medical people when she first arrived at the hospital in Maechan and Chiangrai. She went unconscious and suffered severe brain damage. I was able to move her to a better hospital within hours when I discovered her condition and stabilize her. She became physically healthy again, but brain damage made it so that she barely tracked sound, could not track any object or movement with her eyes and no longer developed any other motor skills. She also had much trouble nursing and swallowing. She became easily frightened but recognized her mother's touch and voice. She was just a little less than a year old at that time. I had arranged for her care for two years hoping that her conditions would improve, but in the past six months it went steadily into decline.

On Jan first Meeh Paw passed away, three years old. It was a sad conclusion to carelessness and disregard so common here for these poor people.

Filing out of the village in a long line of men, climbing the hill, we buried her quietly, with great care, in the jungle woods just next to Meeh Sah who died some two years ago with her child.

As we walked down the mountain and out of the woods, the Akha spoke that now she would at least be close to Meeh Sah and cared for by her, a small company of companions staying together.

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The Smallest amount of help on your part helps us a great deal on this end.

Matthew McDaniel