One of the organizations she established to further this work is the Princess Mother's Medical Volunteer Foundation, through which several thousand volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses, and other workers devote their weekends to treating patients in some 48 of Thailand's provinces.
      The Princess Mother often accompanies the medical teams on their missions, appearing so regularly in the wild mountains of the North that she acquired the affectionate sobriquet of Mae Fa Luang, "The Royal Mother From Heaven." King Bhumibol Adulyadej's elder sister, assists her mother in this work and is also active in several other areas; she is Chairman of the Kidney Foundation, author of books on travel and culture, and former head of the French Language and Literature Department of Thammasat University.
     Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother also actively supports the Border Patrol Police, and elite body of men who form Thailand's first line of defense against infiltration or incursion. Accompanied by Princess Galyani Vadhana, she makes periodic morale-boosting visits to their often isolated camps and provides them with food and other items not readily available in the border region.


With permission from : The National Identity Office, Office of the Prime Minister, Royal Thai government. (1995). Thailand in the 90s. Bangkok: Amarin Printing and Publishing Public Company Limited.