NIST rises to the occasion

The school started off its flood-relief efforts by raising funds from the NIST community to purchase 100 boats, at a total cost of Bt350,000. It raised the amount in less than seven hours and the boats were distributed across the flood-affected areas – 66 were donated in Ayutthaya, 20 in Bang Bua Thong in Nonthaburi and the remainder in affected communities in the greater Bangkok area. This first initiative spiralled into a sequence of fundraising and relief efforts. To date, the NIST community has raised over Bt1 million in cash and countless donations of supplies ranging from donations of 1.6 tonnes of rice, thousands of bottled water, sanitary napkins, to diapers and children’s kits. The school’s second focus was on the distribution of relief packs to those in desperate need of food, water and medicines. This effort was an initiative that replaced the Bangkok Service Conference, an interschool student service conference, that was postponed due to the flooding. International schools united in mid-November and 710 packs were assembled in just under two hours. In addition to the flood-relief efforts, NIST has also helped out Harrow International School, which has been flooded for months, by offering Harrow the use of NIST’s facilities and campus from 3:30pm onwards from Monday to Friday to ensure their senior students can continue learning.
“The NIST executive board considered an approach from Harrow whereby they requested if they could use our facilities for their Year 10, 11, 12 and 13 classes. These are the examinable years for the IGCSE examinations and the British ‘A’ level examinations. NIST would very much like to ‘help out’ during this difficult time in Bangkok and Thailand, to ensure that the young people of Harrow are not unduly affected by the floods which surround their school. So we made a decision to offer this support to students who are in need and to a fellow international school, in Bangkok,” Simon Leslie, NIST’s headmaster, said.