The kids of Ban Chok Amnuay and Rong Rian Chok Amnuay. What I see in my kids’ eyes each morning is excitement to be at school. I get to school around 8 or 8:30 each morning and class doesn’t start until 9:00. As I walk to school I am greeted by the majority of my students. Many of them have been at school since 7:00 and once in a while I hear them playing at 6:30 when I wake up. I think of the typical American student who typically gets to school 30 minutes early if on a school bus or racing in the door if they walk, ride their bike or are driven with a parent. From the conversations I have had with some of the adults in my town as to why kids get to school so early is because many times their parents leave at the crack of dawn to go work in the rice field. School is a safe place for the parents to drop their kids off where they know they will get to school and be with friends. It never ceases to amaze me at how early the kids get to school.
Once the bell rings, the students’ line up for morning assembly. It is run by the head boy and girl of the school, Chaw and Ko. They sing the national anthem, read and spell a word of the day in English and Thai, get morning announcements from one of the teachers and greet their fellow classmates before running off to class.
The mornings at Chok Amnuay School are the time of day when most of the learning takes place. The first two and a half hours of school are the quietest hours of the day. Whether the students are in their rooms learning or giving massages to their teacher it varies on the day. Sometimes the older students will even go to the younger classes and teach them while their teacher is chatting on her phone or hanging out with another teacher.
Once lunch comes around the school erupts with laughter and the playful voices of kids. For lunch the kids bring their own sticky rice and the school provides the veggie and meat to go with it which a group of five or six students share out of the same bowl. Once the bellies are full and the dishes are washed by the girls, play time begins. Students can be found playing soccor, takaw (explained in my sports week blog). Recently many kids have made their own jump ropes out of hundreds of rubber bands tied together. They then play a version of Chinese Jump Rope in which they take turns trying to pin down the linked rubber band using a specific move and repeating it until they mess up. Typically if they complete five repetitions they move onto the next level, the rope is hired and a new move is given. Students play this for hours on end never getting sick of it. They boys have been playing a game with marbles recently in which each boy has a marble and they fling it with their middle finger like a slingshot and try to get it near a hole or hit an opponent’s marble out of the way, the way I understand it, it is like bacchi ball with marbles. The name of the game is look gaeo. Other games include throwing a stack of cards down onto the floor or little plastic links they thoss up in the air and try to grab more on the ground before the one tossed falls back to the ground, named gep gope. I have tried to play but it is nearly impossible to master.
Another common game among the boys is running around the school grounds screeching BPOW BPOW BPOW!! as they hide behind structures and jump out and shoot each other with toy or imaginary guns. They also love drawing pictures of guns and people shooting each other in their notebooks. If these kids played any game remotely related to what they do now they would be immediately expelled. Here that is not the case. While they are playing they are completely unsupervised, other than me watching them out my office window in awe that they are allowed to play such games, the teachers are often in the 4th grade classroom drinking and have not a care about what the students are up to. I want to go up to the teachers and fire them myself and take over teaching all the students all hours of the day. The students are all so eager to learn yet they are being stripped from a good education because the city folk teachers are too wrapped up in their own drinking habits with not a care about what happens to these rice farming country folk kids in their future. They don’t believe in them and it breaks my heart that many of these kids aren’t even given a chance to excel. Teachers, you wonder why your kids can’t read and write by high school? YOU HAVEN’T BEEN DOING YOUR JOB!!!! Many afternoons I will finish up planning lessons or teaching and notice that half the teachers have gone home for the day around 2 or 2:30 when the school day officially ends at 3:30 or 4:00 and non of the kids go home until then. Teachers, why have you chosen the teaching profession if you don’t care about the students or care to teach them?
Home life for a child. Parents back home would be reported immediately to social services if they did what happens around here. Many times when kids get home their parents are still out working and the child, as young as kindergarten, is left at home alone. Many times I get home and Gamon my little brother has been at home for at least an hour and no one is around but him. He will often run home drop off his backpack and run off and wander the neighborhood with friends. Another example, this weekend I was riding my bike to church and Gamon was walking down the lane. I hadn’t seen Mah or Plair and asked him where they were he told me “dtam naa” (planting rice). They really were at Temple but that’s beside the point, they had left Gamon, 5, home alone watching T.V. and I found him out wandering alone. I asked if he wanted to come to church with me but he wanted to keep playing.
Kids often run around the neighborhood alone. One little boy from the house across the street is about 2 years old and often walks in the lane alone. One day a few months back he was picking up rocks and putting them in his pockets, when his pockets were full he would pull down his pants, exposing his bear bottom, rip the rocks out of his pockets in a hurry, pull his pants back up and continue on collecting more rocks and emptying them. So entertained all on his own.
The new afternoon fun has been for one family of about 4 kids, ages 1.5 to 7, to ride their bikes to my house and jump off my front porch. I will pick them up to get super high jumps. We also play hand slapping games or hid from each other on opposite sides of the table. They have the greatest giggles! The first day this tradition started when it was time for me to shower and go to dinner we said our good byes. When I was in the shower I heard crying and shouting of my name. I also heard adult voices. Mah came into my house and asked what I was doing and said that the little girl Om wanted to play more. I’ve only made two Thai kids cry. Once because the little girl Phe Toy’s daughter Gaeo babysits was freaked out by the strange looks of a fralang (white person) and this was the second time, the little girl couldn’t get enough playing time from the strange looking fralang. During our afternoon play time I typically don’t know where the mother is.
There is no such thing as a car seat in Thailand either let alone making sure your kid is at least buckled in. The baby or toddler for that matter has no seat at all as they are held or stand up in the car and move around as they please. Babies even stand on the seat of the motorcycle and hold onto the handlebars as the parent operates the vehicle.
I’m not the one to say that it is wrong to let your kid play unsupervised or be unbuckled in a car yet I notice the difference because it is so opposite from our strict and regimented society I come from. Thai people aren’t quick to sue anyone for a mistake that has happened. In fact they laugh off any type of situation that we would sue over. For instance one of my 4th grade students stuck his hand in the fan last week and everyone laughed at him for trying such a stupid thing. If he lived in the states his parents would most likely be suing the teacher for not watching their child’s every move and predicting his interest in seeing what would happen if his hand was stuck into the sharp blades. If they lost that case, they would sue the fan company for making a fan that their child figured out how to open.
I do believe that there is a happy medium between being too over protective of your child and not leaving them to raise themselves. The kids of Chok Amnuay have so little money that they buy 5 Baht toys (16cents) to create their own games or collect the leftover rubber bands used to close anything and everything and invent their own game with it. They aren’t given a brand new computer, video game or ipod to play with that will prevent them from every getting a broken bone. In some way Thai parents are better parents because they let their children explore the world for themselves and use their own imagination to let their own creativity develop.
Check out more pictures of kids playing below and watch this video of them playing their jumprope game.
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