Dayk is a 13 year old boy. He’s one of only 9 boys who actually lives on site. He’s not delinquent, but sometimes he acts out and gets angry, mostly coz he feels like there isn’t a single adult that he can connect with like a parent. Cindy may have been the closest thing to a parent this kid has ever known, and sadly, while Cindy committed to 2 years at the site, her life isn’t here, its in Canada. The day Cindy left, Dayk’s eyes watered, fighting tears from falling while he and Cindy pounded knuckles with each other to say bye.

Since she left, he’s been all the more determined to get out of Thailand to get to Canada. He’s been taking English more seriously, or as seriously as the school’s curriculum will allow him to. Dayk is another one of the kids on site that managed to slide through the cracks without nationality. His mother is a Thai citizen who works in a “massage parlor” and his father was Chinese. He’s since passed away. If he wants nationality; if he wants to get a passport, he has to be on a waiting list anywhere between 10-20 years.

One afternoon I was making Bingo boards in the activity room one day for my youngest classes. It mostly involved coloring in each square and writing the name of the color in English…obviously not hard, but TEDIOUS when you’re making enough for a class of 25.

The other day, Dayk found me and saw what I was doing and then said to me, “I wanna help!” I smiled, handed him a Bingo Board, a box of crayons and told him, “Thanks.” So he started filling in the blocks and then tried to write the words in English. For the color, red, he wrote, “reb.” I smiled again and tried to tell him, demonstrating on a piece of scrap paper, “It’s actually, d, not b.” This is a really confusing and subtle difference if you don’t actually use this alphabet in your native language. He nodded his head and started erasing his work. After a small pause he looked at me and asked me, “How come Americans speak English so well?” to which I responded, “I don’t know. How come Thai people speak Thai so well?” He nodded his head, realizing for the first time that English is the native language of most Americans. He paused for a little bit, looked a little disheartened and then asked me, “Why can’t I speak English?”

And this is where I felt like a failure and said to him, “You speak English better than any of your Thai or Burmese friends,” which was actually true, despite the fact that I had to have this conversation with him in Thai for him to understand me. At the end of the day, he’s part of the Half Day School, one branch of the organization, where the English language is taken about as seriously as Ethics was at my high school. In other words, it’s a joke. The school is supposed to be vocation-skills-oriented, so all book courses are cut in half of what they are in a proper school, and in the rank of priorities, English falls below Math, Science or Thai. In this school, what the kids know of English includes the alphabet, numbers (mostly) fruit and animals….some prepositions. In the last few months, my work has become more administrative and activity development oriented. Visitors have been coming in flux and so I spend every other afternoon with a stranger giving tours, answering questions, or corresponding with a prospective visitor or group via email. Very occasionally, I’ll get slammed with a surprise presentation to do.

I’ve been butting heads with the head of the education department about my classes being cancelled and my not knowing about it until the last possible second. I always smile at him, coz he always smiles at me. One day, while I was passing by him, we exchanged giant smiles and then I said to him, “Hey! Where was my level 6 today?!” “Level 6? Oh, they went on a field trip.” “Yeah, yeah, did tell me this BEFORE they went on a field trip? No, you didn’t, did you.” And then walk back into my office. Last Wednesday three staff members pulled all of the guys out of my level 5 class so they could help take down the tents that were set up for a ceremony the week before. I gotta say, this sortof thing happens and I get pissed. Out of the hundreds of kids in the half days school, there are more than a few handful of them that are eager to learn and I’m not given enough time with them to actually teach them anything.

It’s those moments I’m sitting with someone like Dayk who wants so badly to be able to LEAVE Thailand to live somewhere else, I feel like I’m cheating these people something I could be giving them. Activity development has been great and I feel like I’ve been able to contribute in a different way than I thought I would be…but something about this all still doesn’t sit with me right at all.