Meet the Muslim team who helped to feed the Thai cave rescue mission

After the successful rescue of the 12 boys and their coach last night from a cave in Northern Thailand, stories about the amazing volunteers that helped the mission spread quickly across the web.

Among the cave divers, Navy SEALs and entrepreneur Elon Musk with his mini submarine was a group of Muslim women who realised that the Muslims in the rescue team would need halal food. Sophia Thaianant led the Muslim women rescue volunteers, who cooked about 200 halal meals a day during the operation and delivered them to the rescue site, according to a BBC video.

The football team Wild Boars was trapped for 17 days in the cave along with their coach after heavy rains flooded the way out. Thaianant said that her group got donations from Muslims across the country to fund the halal meals. Islam is the second largest religion of Thailand after Buddhism: about 4–5 per cent of the population are Muslims.

She added that Muslim and Buddhist volunteers in Chiang Rai, the closest city to the rescue site, worked together to see the mission succeed. In the video, one of the volunteers said that on the days she made special meals such as curry or biryani, she made extra so that “everyone can eat, not just the Muslims.”

The efforts by Sophia Thaianant and her team of volunteers were made known thanks to Facebook user Anindya Ghose, whose post about the volunteers went viral. Anindya had been closely following the story on social media and shared a compilation of snippets collected online on his page. The post has been liked 92,000 times so far and been shared 86,710 times on Facebook alone.

In the post, Ghose said, “I have been following it for the past couple of weeks and put together a collection of pics from the Twitter feed of various folks on the ground in Chiang Rai. If you like to see what real life heroes and humanity at it best looks like, look no further. These are the pics of heroes on the ground in Thailand ... from various parts of life (cave divers, Thai Navy Seals, water engineers, farmers, cooks, dry cleaners, birds nest hunters, small business owners, and many more.)”

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