With heavy hearts, the Board of The Mandalay Projects has made the difficult decision to suspend services in Myanmar. Read the full announcement here.
Our school house, originally built in 2012 for children aged five to seven years, has recently been repurposed as a nursery facility for children aged under five. This new nursery took in its first resident in October 2019. It now has nine children under its care with the youngest just four months old.
In 2012, we teamed up with an Australian philanthropist, Andrew Brown, to build a school house and provide a specialist teacher for orphaned children aged five to seven years at this large site in Luang Prabang. These young children may have been at risk of exploitation and the residential school offered a safe and health environment. At the time, the orphanage was home to over 500 children, ranging from 7 to 18 years of age.
We have recently heard from Andrew that, after many years of effort on his part, he has reached agreement with the Lao authorities to establish a nursery facility catering for children under 5 years of age, the first of its kind in Laos.
As part of the negotiations around this new initiative, the Lao government agreed to fund a new school house. We are pleased to report that our original building has now been redeveloped as the nursery.