Miss Naree is the oldest of the Gang of Four. She’s eight plus a bunch of weeks. Her nickname is Jit. She doesn’t read or write very well yet but when it comes to arithmetic, double wow! When you’re eight, reading is for cartoon books and something barely required to play computer games. Arithmetic, on the other hand, is street kid survival.
Numbers are always important. City bus numbers, lottery numbers, deck-of-card numbers—that’s vital stuff. It’s terrible not knowing bus numbers, not knowing where you’re going.
Sure, it’s easy to get home when you see the bridge, at least for Jit, because her old slum is right under the suspension bridge. But what if the bus isn’t going in that direction? For an eight-year-old slum girl, being lost is the ultimate loss of face. Also, it’s dangerous. You might have to ask an adult and that’s a risky situation at best. And if the boys ever found out, they’d call you a “buffalo.”
Counting fast in card games is also a basic slum skill. Even slum kids who can’t read can do double-digit card sums. It’s expected of them. When confronted with a column of figures, they panic. Never seen the stuff before. Again, not required.
But they’re whizzes where they have to be: a gambling or a business transaction—these kids are cool, never miss. Because bad accounting means you go hungry. School teachers often don’t realize that a lot of these kids only learn out of survival, especially kids like Jit, who has no father and whose mother is in jail.
It’s not her mom’s first time in a jail, but the previous stays were shorter, so Jit could still run the household and look after her two younger brothers, more or less. This time, it’s different. Her mom is in for a while and local drug dealers had been using Jit and her brothers to deliver amphetamines. That’s why some of the women in the slum had all three children sent to us.
Another kid in the Gang of Four is Ooy. She’s healthy but an AIDS orphan. Her dad, who gave it to her mom, died first. Mom died destitute after selling her slum home to take care of her husband. Ooy wants to be a nurse when she grows up.
Miss Ikkey is next, she’s seven. Her sister Toi is six.
Together, the Gang of Four hired a tuk-tuk to take them to the zoo.
I really don’t know the whole story. The part about going to the zoo is true. Hiring the tuk-tuk to get them there, that’s also true. Even the part about them telling the tuk-tuk driver to collect his fare from Chaem, their house mom, is true. It’s the part about the baby elephant I’m not as sure about.
The girls said they had to visit a certain male baby elephant because they had heard he lost his mother to poachers. That was their excuse, at least. In any case, they got in a tuk-tuk and said, “Take us to the zoo,” which is a considerable distance from the Klong Toey slums.
When the Gang returned, they said they had talked to the baby elephant and told him that all was manageable, that they didn’t have a mom, either. And having or not having a mom is irrelevant because nobody is an orphan—that’s a really dumb adult word. Makes it sound like we think the kids are helpless, yet they’re not. You take love where you can and from whomever you can trust, and if they want to love you, and ask nothing bad in return, that’s a fair trade.
As their story goes, they also told the baby elephant that if he could sneak out of the zoo, he could come stay with them for a few days, that they’d work a traffic intersection, clean windshields for spare change, pool their earnings and buy plenty of bananas. Ikkey and Toi told the elephant that they knew older street boys who claimed to know the whereabouts of plenty of sweet grass to eat, but they weren’t sure they could trust these boys too much. Ikkey and Toi promised to check out the grass situation as soon they could persuade a tuk-tuk driver to take the Gang of Four back to Klong Toey. These boys they knew also liked elephants so they would surely find the grass.
What they said they told the elephant rings true in parts—at least the part that we just have to look around to find love and protection. That’s true for all of us, because these children are just like we were as kids, aren’t they? Jit and her two brothers, Ooy, Ikkey and Toi really exist and they tell stories just like the ones we told as children, though in a slightly different form, of course.
But while these kids believe in the power of love and friendship, what they want most on Children’s Day is a mom. Dads, too, of course. In their world, to find a mom who combs your hair and sends you off to school with candy money, and a real dad with an uptown job would be the triple-best present ever.
Maybe this Children’s Day, we can take a lesson from these children and give all of these lost children love and kindness in return. Let’s give a street kid a present! Let’s go out of our way to be kind to them. It’s Children’s Day!
Jit has decided to visit her old home for the day. The whole Gang of Four is with her too. Plus her two brothers, of course. There will be neighborhood festivities where Jit and her Gang plan to sell sheets of old newspaper for people to sit on while they watch the bands and performers. Getting bundles of old newspaper for free and selling them as “seats” for three baht a sheet, they figure they can make a bundle.
We are not orphans, they say.