Close Window

Namfon Khaowanna

"My name is Namfon Khaowanna. I was born September 16, 1973, and I have one younger brother. My father is a longan fruit gardener and my mother runs a grocery. As a child, I would wake up early in the morning to help her until the school bus would take me to school. In the evenings, I would help my mother again and then we would do my homework together. Ever since I can remember, I have seen my parents work really hard. Even on his holidays, my father would help my mother in her shop. After my brother's birth, my mother also sold sweets and I helped her until I could make the sweets by myself.

"When I graduated from high school, I studied at Chiang Mai University and lived in the university dormitory. I taught English at the YMCA on the side and would go back home during holidays. I used the income I earned from teaching to pay for my dorm and food, and also to help my mother. When was I newly graduated from the university with a major in French and tourism, I didn't apply for a job but rather helped my mother make sweets and taught English at home. But I started feeling bored because my mother had four assistants and my students were naughty. So I applied for a job and was successfully received.

"For the next five years I worked as an executive assistant in an organization that developed projects related to HIV. Eventually the organization set up a foundation, which I have been managing up to now. In 2003, I wrote a project requesting some capital from the Swedish government and received a two-year fund to support and develop the skills and the marketing of people with HIV. I met many people affected with HIV who have handcrafts knowledge and skills, but their health was not strong.

"In 2005 I set up a new foundation to develop human relations and return the dharma to social life. The work I now do is developing the skills and expertise of people, in accordance with the conservation of Thai culture. Basically, I design, and people with HIV or elderly villagers bring my ideas to life. Thai people have a lot of ability but most don't know much about marketing. So when completed, they sell their work to me and I try to market it. I feel happy I have joined in to increase the income of older people and people with HIV. I have always stood by the motto that 'work should make us happy.' Now I have found work that means exactly that.

"Everybody must have consciousness and develop one's spirit. Thinking, talking and doing good will get back to you in a good way. It is challenging and difficult to do good and to think positively. Life is short and worth living. Indeed you may know your birthday but not your day of death. Live a good life, help yourself, your family and the social community – this is what I try and apply. I develop my life by following Buddha. I give alms and observe religious precepts. I always try to train and learn by myself. I like to read books, write poems and draw pictures. I hope being born with a certain intellect and cultivating it will solve problems, help others and myself."