THAILAND: A Samaritan’s Quest to Save Children

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MAE SAI, Thailand, Sep 16 2004 (IPS) - He is treated like a star when he crosses the bridge that connects this northern town in Thailand to Burma. As he walks, the street children call out his name, while frail women, with babies in their arms, come up to him and smile.

Guljohn Jeamram receives such a welcome due to his record of saving poor children from the narrow streets of Mae Sai.

It also conveys an often ignored feature of life in this town – that its cross-border activity includes the children from poverty-stricken homes in Burma who slip into Thailand daily to beg on the streets or raid garbage dumpsters for recyclable materials.

Mee Su was once such a child. Shortly after she turned eight, she began begging to help her family survive. If she could not enter Mae Sai by crossing the bridge, she would take a more dangerous route, particularly during the monsoon – swimming across the narrow stretch of the nearby Sai River that divides Thailand from Burma.

”We came every day before nine in the morning,” said Mee Su, now 14 years. ”There were other children who used to cross with me – more than 10 – and we would stay here till five in the evening.”

But such a rigorous routine is behind her. This girl from the Akha ethnic community gave it up for the new life offered to her two years ago by Guljohn, or ‘Kru Ngau’ as the children have nicknamed him, meaning ‘Teacher Ngau’ in Thai.

”Life here is different. I do not have to beg and I can go to school,” she said.

And the place Mee Su lives in is surrounded by open stretches of paddy fields, fruit orchards and gentle, tree-covered hills. There are 75 other former street children living in the wooden houses on stilts that Guljohn and his staff have built as part of their shelter for these children.

Childlife, the shortened name of the project that Guljohn runs, has been taking largely Akha children from Burma and stateless children from Mae Sai’s streets into their care since 1999.

Education at a nearby school is part of Childlife’s mission, as is the quest to wean the children away from habits such as taking drugs or selling them to earn money.

”The idea to help them came after I had spent a year researching the lives of some street children,” said the handsome 30-year-old Thai over a lunch of rice and fish at his shelter. ”The children wanted to get away from the street, stay some where and go to school.”

And Guljohn is determined to offer hope to such children, whose numbers have not dwindled since he gave up his career plans to become an interior designer for a more soul-satisfying life as a good Samaritan.

What attracts the street children to this town are the foreign and Thai tourists who travel here to glimpse its façade of shops filled with goods from Burma and even visit the Burmese town of Tachileik on the other side of the Sai River.

But child rights activists fear that the street children could be trapped into the vices Mae Sai is known for – supplying young girls into Thailand’s throbbing sex industry and being a point where drugs from Burma are smuggled through.

”The street children in Mae Sai are very vulnerable due to the sex trade in the area,” Titima Wanwilaiwan from the Thai office of the international Child rights lobby End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT) said in an interview.

Most of these children have no choice but to beg because they are sent here by their parents, who live in impoverished villages in Burma, she added. ”There have been cases of poor parents selling their babies for 2,000 baht (50 U.S. dollars) to get some money.”

Human traffickers also come after these children, says Nuchanart Boonkong, coordinator of the Volunteer Group for Children’s Development, which cares for street children through a drop-in-centre in Mae Sai.

”In the past three years 26 children have been saved from traffickers,” she told IPS at her centre, close to the banks of the Sai River.

Since setting up her programme, Nunchanart has uncovered child exploitation involving both boys and girls. ”Some boys have been sexually abused by foreign men who are part of a network based in (the nothern town of) Chiang Mai,” she said.

”The men who go after these boys know that the children cannot speak out, because of their illegal status,” she added. ”The tourist who comes to Mae Sai can get a child directly from a village in Burma.”

Currently, child rights activists estimate that there are close to 50 children who cross the border daily to beg in this town. Some of them come from Yaboyaya, a village in Burma some eight kilometers away from Tachilek.

In this village, home to about 70 families from the Akha community, the people live in small dilapidated houses with walls of bamboo or chipped cement. Poverty has stunted many of them. Some women stand in doorways, dressed in rags.

Mee Su is a daughter of this village. She returns home once a month to spend time with her parents, which is an activity Guljohn’s organisation encourages for all the children who still have homes.

”They are here because their parents gave permission,” says Guljohn. ”But not all have stayed. Some children have run away after a few months because they were not used to the rules they have to live by.”

Childlife’s doors, however, will always be open to them, he admits. ”I cannot say no to children who want to join us.”