K9 Club at CHSAThai Stray Animal Shelter – Service Trip
December 8-10, 2019
Although being fairly new, the Wells K9 Club came together once again to organize the annual service trip to visit the lively animals at CHSAthai (Compassionate House for Stray Animals in Thailand), who desperately need our support. This shelter is located in Saraburi, and the 3-day overnight trip took place from December 8 to 10, 2019. For these 3 days, we accommodated our team at the Had Song Kwae Resort near the shelter, making transportation for the 37 people easy. Once we had arrived at the shelter, we had a tour of the entire shelter while playing and meeting the dogs, cats, pigs, and a monkey. The next day, everybody got into work mode. We were big in number, so we divided ourselves into groups and shifts where we helped the shelter plant trees, trim plants, and moved heavy objects to organize the place. K9 Club continued the work and finished the final touches on the third day.
The ultimate goal and focus of this trip was to provide our love and support to the 2000+ animals taking residence at the shelter. Considering they don’t get a lot of visitors, one of the most pressing concerns for the owner was both raising awareness about the mistreatment of the animals before they were brought to the shelter, as well as attempting to show the animals that they are loved and cared for. Together with this, we also lent a hand with some tedious gardening work that helped the environment the animals were in.
Additionally, another one of our bigger goals was to help advertise the shelter in order to increase the donations they receive, as well as give them a voice on a larger platform. In order to accomplish this, our team created a promotional video in which the entire shelter is shown, together with the work we did there. In order to raise as much money as we could to give the shelter during this trip, K9 Club hosted a series of events at Wells. This included making smoothies, selling shirts made with our logo, as well as having movie nights. All of the profit from the events as well as our past earnings were successfully donated to the CHSAthai Stray Animal Shelter.
The days spent with the animals went by quickly, and it was time to say goodbye. By the end of the third day, the K9 members and chaperones thanked the owner and staff of the shelter for sharing with our club an unforgettable experience that both reminded us of the reason we made this club, as well as motivated us to continue our hard work. The owner of the CHSAthai Stray Animal Shelter was extremely appreciative of everyone’s effort and dedication. It was then time to head back to Bangkok.
Here are some of the promotional videos created by our K9 members:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW_rtjVCv5Q&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUmKmvSMLBk
If you would like to donate to CHSAThai, they are very welcoming and appreciative of monetary donations or donations in the form of animal food and related materials. Please follow the link to their Facebook page for more details:
https://www.facebook.com/CHSAThai/
We would like to give a special thanks to the owner of CHSAThai for his warm welcome and sharing of knowledge, and for our chaperones, Mr. Ray, Mr. Chase and Ms. Chawisa, for their dedication and support. We believe the trip turned out to be a success and the K9 Club will surely revisit the shelter again next year!
Written by: Riddhi Tandon & Pam Chatdecha (Class of 2021)