Reality check

Heavenly Home is a small two story mixed wood and concrete structure.   It is surrounded by bare ground, some of it covered by brown pools of water as the incessant rain that greets us has liquified the mud.

Downstairs are outhouses and a play area.  Upstairs are makeshift double deck beds festooned with stuffed toys, and a dining area of wooden tables and benches.  A small kitchen overhanging the backyard allows enormous quantities of food to be cooked.  Despite the frugality evident, this serves as the refuge for more than 30 abandoned kids, undocumented aliens in a strange land.

We are in Mae Sot, a small provincial town in Thailand nearest the border of Burma.  There is modernization going on, as medium sized edifices and car dealerships can be seen as you whiz through concrete highways.  But the populace still walk around in traditional Burmese clothing with yellow powder spread carefully on their faces, some say for religious reasons, others, for vanity purposes.

Mae Sot is a preferred destination for Burmese refugees fleeing from poverty and/or military presence, and that is why we encounter residents who don’t even speak Thai.  Not that we can speak Thai ourselves, but then lugging along an interpreter becomes useless.

The swarm of humanity flooding Mae Sot is also responsible for the children left in Heavenly Home.  Mothers cannot afford to keep the babe, and vow to come back once they have found a stable income aside from their salaries as maids.  Or, the babes are simply unwanted.  Maybe they are the product of a failed relationship, or worse, rape committed by military personnel.  The end result of all these sundry reasons is that we face an army of eyes as we make our way in.

They aren’t distrustful.  Yet.  They just gaze at us, the strangers who have come to invade their space.  We have come to spend only a few hours of our lives with them, hoping against hope (I thought I’d never be able to use that in my writing career) that those few hours would be enough to make an impact in their lives.

They sit quietly on wooden benches.  At a signal, they burst into a prayer song, some with their eyes screwed tight.  Bowls are then passed in front of them.  Inside are bananas, half a banana for the tots, one whole banana for the bigger ones.  There is no grabbing or immediate chewing.  They wait patiently until everyone is served, and at the signal, start digging in.  When they are done, each hands his bowl over, and lets his hands be wiped.  Then it’s back to gazing at us.

A half hour later, and with the magic worked by colorful balloons, we have achieved chaos.  Children shriek as they run around, or pummel us with their rubbery weapons.  We are only able to settle them down once we play the first Winnie the Pooh movie they have ever seen, courtesy of the DVD player we have donated.  Never mind that Winnie and Tigger speak in English, and the DVD has subtitles in Thai, and most of them cannot speak Thai, but variants of Burmese dialects.  They are transfixed.

They clamor to sit on our laps, and once there, push others away from their perch.  It is easy to imagine that they seek the solace of father figures, and we now embody the parent they have always longed for. That, however, is probably latent maternal impulses, or we are just imagining too many orphan movies into this scene.

It is not imagination, however, that the kids have no foreseeable future.  The funds they subsist on are scarce.  The funds that we bring do nothing to secure them a future, except to buy them a couple of months of food security.  We hand over to the dedicated couple who run this tight ship, with amazing fortitude and compassion, some funds that my friends have been able to collect from their friends.  I am ashamed we can do nothing more.

I want to grab Big Eyed Boy, Blue Boy and Laughing Boy together with Pixie Girl and Chinita Girl and bring them home with me.  Unfortunately, they have no passports, not even official Thai citizenship to allow them to get one.  Channeling Angelina and Madonna will have to come later.  If it ever does.