Your donations go to infant care, vitamins, medical supplies, wells, bread and fish for the villages, as well as many other areas. All donations for larger items such as wells, gathering places (the Akha style village center) and other major improvements can be verified as to their location with Global Positioning Satellite Latitude and Longitude reference points. Therefore, if you donate money to build a well, you can ask for the longitude and latitude position of the well you donated and you can go to that location independently of us, or send a friend there, and that well WILL BE THERE!

I will, of course, continue to report the progress of major projects, and post pictures of those projects, on this site.

After ten years, I have a significant online presence, I have been visited by numerous organizations and people, and I have had numerous volunteers who have come here and then written reports about the rather overwhelming work that I must do in order to feel it is succeeding at all.

I have had my video work shown in the Smithsonian, on the National Geographic channel, on the Archeology Channel where it is now on the web, in Italy, Israel, Europe and a few other places. Type "Akha" or "Matthew McDaniel" into Google and see what you come up with. There are a jillion references there.

Does it bring in donors. Mostly no. I have more than 1300 people on my weekly journal email list, not counting the yahoo lists, since I only count each yahoo list as only one of those 1300 names. I mail out to twenty or more yahoo lists. Yet my support not counting the occasional irregular donation, is less than $300 US per month for all this madness and that comes from less than a dozen people. After ten years.

I do my work the best I can. I do not tell people to give me money, I ask, I plead with them, that they would give me some money to help the work. I persue grants, but this takes an enormous amount time.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

The Akha Heritage Foundation
PO BOX 6073
Salem OR 97304 USA

Donations by direct banking can be transferred to:

Akha Heritage Foundation Acc. # 0081-889693 Wells Fargo Bank 4990 N. River Road. Keizer, Oregon,  97303 USA ABA # 121000248

Or, In Thailand:          Matthew Duncan McDaniel     Acc. # 3980240778     Bangkok Bank Ltd.     Maesai Branch     Thailand

Donations by Credit Card can be made at this URL:
http://www.drugwar.com/store/prodpage.cfm
I am usually able to thank credit card donors the same day via email.

My Vision

The vision behind my work with the Akha people is that they should have just opportunity and the right to appeal actions which effect them and conditions under which they live which are so often imposed by either government or missions.

It was not my intent to battle the missions. But missions intend to destroy everything that is Akha. Their work is based on an incredible dishonesty and denial of what they are really doing to say nothing of arrogance that in Thailand it is their right to impose a foreign religion on the Akha. Conversion is violence, let us not forget that. There are few examples where conversion did not occur violently.

Surely the rifts and disputes the missions cause in their splitting of villages, and division between elders, between elderly and children can be summed up as nothing but violence.

Meanwhile the missionaries from Maesai, Huai Krai, Maechan, ChiangRai and Chiangmai live and sleep in comfortable homes after they have done much to divide the villages and cause so much disharmony and cultural destruction.

Mostly I work to ease immediate conditions, such as illness and nutrition problems. Secondly I work to assist measures that prevent problems from recurring. These may be issues such as land rights or water supply.

If you have comments or questions about this project, please feel free to contact me, Matthew McDaniel, at

akha@loxinfo.co.th