Waikato man’s 20-year fight for Thailand’s most vulnerable children

Saturday, 27 June 2026

Every day, Matamata-raised Mark Curragh takes a rutted road to his Thai jungle office in the branches of a mango tree.

Metal steps spiral upwards to a timber treehouse that overlooks some of the nation’s most marginalized children. The workspace is Mark’s design, a highly functional touch of whimsy built to serve the Children of the Forest (COF) project that has dominated his life for the last 20 years.

As project manager, the Waikato man helps oversee more than 60 staff and daily operations for a 400-student school, as well as homes for single mothers and about 70 resident orphaned, at risk or abandoned children and babies. Most of them stateless. Hundreds more receive support through various outreach programmes, which means the quietly-spoken 59-year-old shoulders responsibility for more than over 1000 children a day.

While he certainly doesn’t do the job alone, Mark is responsible for stretching budgets and liaising with donors and officials. He’s also trying to help the organisation ensure recently-developed rubber and durian plantations lead towards a degree of financial sustainability.

Mark’s extraordinary wife Talaithow, who was born in Myanmar, is another key player in the organisation. She runs the rudimentary medical clinic on site, as well as an outreach programme that sees her visit thousands of vulnerable families every year; malnourished elderly, sick mothers, children who risk being sold by desperate parents.

Because, wild as the jungle is - think cobras, tigers, poisonous spiders – it is fellow humans who pose the greatest risk to children living in and around the border town of Sangkhla Buri. In this remote corner of Thailand, about 400km northwest of Bangkok, decades of conflict have forced families to flee neighbouring Myanmar for the relative safety of this no-man’s land.

Without the correct identity card, these often-traumatised people struggle to access education or healthcare. Jobs, money and food are scarce, housing is grim, alcoholism and amphetamine addiction are rife, leaving children exposed to abuse and trafficking. Not to mention malaria, typhoid, HIV-Aids.

It was project director and founder Daniel Hopson who recognised education offers these vulnerable children a practical path out of poverty and danger. In 2005, the British teacher borrowed money from his parents to build two basic bamboo-walled classrooms and sent word to friends that he needed volunteers. Fellow teacher Mark Curragh, who he met while teaching English in Japan, was the first to sign up for a six-month stint.

Two decades on, the project’s creator and his Kiwi friend have no plans to leave. Daniel’s brother Craig is a resident art teacher now, while their parents Tom and Lynda have long since given up UK home ownership to volunteer full time on site.

The farang (foreigners) work alongside a team of local teachers, social workers, outreach staff, care mothers, drivers, administrators and clinic workers who have essential firsthand knowledge of their community’s particular needs.

There is constant pressure to expand the fees-free school. Fifteen classrooms now, with compassionate staff who speak Karen and Mons dialects, as well as Burmese and Thai. Specialist English teachers offer further opportunities.

“This school is the bridge,” Mark says.

Give these students enough education and they can enter the Thai school system. Give them enough support to succeed in that system and they become eligible for an all-important Thai identity card.

English teacher Saranee is proof the approach works. She was eight years old, out of school, undocumented and living in the jungle when her older sister enrolled her in the then-fledgling COF school. Now, the university graduate has spurned better paid city teaching opportunities to return to the place that helped shape her future.

“Why wouldn’t I,” she says. “It’s our home.”

More than half the school’s teachers are former students, all with tertiary education and accompanying Thai residency rights. Saranee points out the communal kitchen, where spiced tom yum chicken soup bubbles on a stove, to feed every mouth on the property. Pupils receive breakfast and lunch because, for many, even plain rice is hard to come by at home.

Classrooms with floors of concrete or bamboo are hung with students’ work and bright illustrations depicting teeth cleaning and hand washing. During breaks, there is abundant laughter as lean limbs clamber up trees and kick balls or crowd teachers and visiting strangers for high fives and fist bumps. Group hugs are the norm as clumps of children wrap themselves around adult waists or legs with the kind of casual trust that speaks of feeling safe.

Their playground joy is as real as the dark truth behind their presence here. Current enrolments include two brothers who were set on the ground beneath Mark’s mango tree office, abandoned by their father at age four and 18 months. The toddler cried for two weeks straight, pausing only to sleep. Another student was rescued after her mother tried to sell her to traffickers. Others return home each day to violence, mental health issues, addiction and empty rice bowls.

It’s a far cry from Mark’s middle class Matamata childhood, though he certainly absorbed lessons in service from his community-minded parents Jan and Bill. All three of his younger siblings and their families have visited the project and helped out over the years.

Mark rides out bouts of homesickness with calls to the whanau, and writing benders where his fictional stories are often set in Aotearoa. Last time he returned home he spent a day volunteering alongside his late mother’s old friends in the Matamata Catholic Women’s League op shop. The league has supported COF for years, using a portion of shop proceeds to help fund a washing centre and other projects.

While back in New Zealand visiting family, Matamata’s most famous destination periodically provides Mark with casual work in the Hobbiton gardens or with ongoing development. His earnings help stretch the family coffers to raise sons Blue and Winter and foster children, JJ and Bang.

Not for this family the privileged expat life of a walled compound and home help. In their neighbourhood feral dogs prowl the lanes after dark, dishes are washed under a tap outside and monsoon rains often mean flooding indoors and out. There is no air conditioning to combat the tropical heat. And they work hard, these two. Long days, seven days a week, their phones rarely out of reach as the emergencies roll in.

At 7am, a young mother of three arrives on one of the school trucks that gather students from surrounding villages. The woman is haemorrhaging, her three-month old foetus aborted. After a visit to the local hospital, Talaithow gathers a sack of rice and a bottle of cooking oil, steers the hunched and pale patient towards a truck for the return journey, toddler and mother-in-law in tow. She wants to assess her patient’s living arrangements first-hand. It turns out that home is a flimsy bamboo and tarpaulin hut up a dirt track, off a dirt road in the rubber plantation that offers tenuous, seasonal, poorly-paid work. This young mother, who married at 14 and has received no schooling, is the family’s sole breadwinner as her husband has epilepsy and cirrhosis of the liver. The two older children are COF school pupils.

And it won’t be the saddest outreach case Talaithow sees this week, between the motorbike crash victims and dengue fever patients that visit her clinic. Trained in a Medicine Sans Frontier jungle hospital in Southern Myanmar, Talaithow learned to treat landmine injuries, to deliver vaccines or babies, to find solutions with next to no resources. Part medic, part social worker, she can also whip up a stellar multi-course meal for guests and make chocolate from the cacao plants that she and Mark grow.

Talaithow crossed the Thai border solely to find work that would help her people and says COF allows her to do exactly that. Where others see problems, she sees possibilities.

“I love the whole parts of my job,” she says. “But what I love most is to deliver a baby because you don’t know what will happen next with that child”.

Mark sees more possibilities on his office walls, which are plastered with photos of hundreds of education scholarship recipients currently in Thai schools. So he and his colleagues continue to say yes in the face of endless need and they keep finding ways to help one school place, one clinic visit, one food parcel, one safe bed at a time.

Want to find our more or donate to Children of the Forest? Contact mark@childrenoftheforest.org