Her name was Janchira. She was fifteen when she drowned in the Chao Phraya River near the Dao Kannong Temple early one morning. She had jumped off a sand barge that was moored for the night until tomorrow’s high tide when it would be towed to the sand pier just past the Slaughterhouse. She jumped feet first into the river. Jumped in for fun after sniffing glue.
Her mom still doesn’t know. Mom left on a plane to Italy some thirteen years ago and came back once but without any presents. Janchira’s auntie raised her. When we told her Janchira was dead, she broke down and cried and said she hoped the girl could be born again happier, as a good girl, and not have to suffer as a street urchin. Her grandma didn’t seem to register the news. The family decided not to tell her bed-ridden grandpa, who lives in a shack in Lock Two of Klong Toey. He loved her and they don’t wish to sadden him. She’s just gone for a bit.
Janchira was the best swimmer among her friends; she had also sniffed the most glue. Five of them had been having a Klong Toey birthday party the night before. They didn’t have much party money. Just enough for a bit of food, some booze and glue—a Slum Cocktail, they call it.
The next morning, these kids were still bombed on glue and having boozy headaches. Glue makes you fearless. Cut your arms and watch the blood come. You blur reality and think you’re totally sober. And so they thought that jumping from a sand barge four meters above the canal into a strong current is beautiful. Yes, beautiful. Because through the glue, everything looks wonderful.
They had no money for a sober-up remedy. Street kids tell you that their best anti-glue remedy are these red, individually wrapped hard candies that can be bought at most mom and pop stores. Other remedies work too, they say, but the red stuff is the medicine of choice. Regardless, Janchira and her friends were without the remedy that morning—and feeling fearless.
Janchira often would ask about her mom. What did she look like? Was she pretty? Was she tall? Fat or thin? Somebody in their household had torn up all the photographs ever taken of her when she bolted from Thailand to chase another rainbow. Janchira couldn’t remember her mom’s face or the sound of her voice. Her auntie always told her that her mom could sing pretty well, not good enough to sing in a nightclub, but she did enjoy singing. In Janchira’s fantasy, she had a TV model mom, a beauty. She had no vision of her dad. Nobody talked about him at all.
She wasn’t the first street kid to die in the neighborhood canal. There have been four recent drownings that we know of near the Memorial Bridge, all of them kids drunk on glue. Two of them jumped and two rolled in while sleeping. Perhaps there have been others. Nobody tallies this kind of tragedy.
On a Wednesday morning on the twenty-eighth of May, seven-year-old Duang jumped first. Then Janchira and her boyfriend jumped in. Then all three panicked. The two other friends who had not jumped in, Aum and Bam, looked for a rope—anything they could throw down to them. The boyfriend held onto a barge support while Duang and Janchira held onto his leg. By the time a rope appeared, Janchira had lost hold of her boyfriend’s leg, and the current pulled her under the barge.
Janchira was wearing her favorite red t-shirt and jeans, which must have weighed her down in her struggle. Also, her left leg was bruised and weak from a recent motorcycle injury. Her friends saw her go under, and they knew.
The family that lives on the sand barge had warned them not to jump. They shouted to them more than once that the current was deadly. The kids never heard them or maybe didn’t want to. When Janchira went under, the family would not go into the canal to search for her. Not even the Ruam Katanyu rescue workers would hazard it. It was too dangerous.
Aum, Janchira’s best friend, watched everything from the top of the barge. She later begged a few baht for bus fare and rode the number 205 city bus an hour across town, then begged her way on a baht bus, arriving at our Mercy Centre in shock and tears. Took her half an hour before she could stop sobbing and tell her story.
We phoned the district police station to begin the search for Janchira’s body. By the time we arrived at the sand barge, a crowd had been gathering since the early morning. We were told we could hire a tugboat to move the barges and dragnet for her body. It would cost 40,000 baht (over $1,000) to push these four sand barges, each ten meters wide and fifteen meters long. That was the going price. The rescue workers offered to help but said even they could not guarantee they could find Janchira. We decided to wait.
She surfaced twenty-four hours later just half a kilometer down the river, near the suspension bridge. We prayed the first night in our small chapel in Mercy Centre and the next two nights at the local temple. Every single adult and child at Mercy Centre joined us for prayers all three nights. We asked the motorcycle taxi drivers who stand in front of our building to watch our home for us in our absence. It is imperative that all our street kids and orphans know that it is proper and useful and even necessary to pray for the dead. Janchira was one of us, a member of our family. Each of us prayed and cried for her.
At the temple, Janchira’s auntie and three neighbors placed coins in the casket so that Janchira would have wealth in the next life. Janchira never saw her sixteenth birthday. She had one, maybe two chances to make it and needed just one more. Not like the ten or more chances the good folks from uptown get. If you’re uptown, there’s a bit of protection—family, uncles who know at least somebody a bit important who can “fix” things or unravel sticky situations. But on the streets and in the slums, you have to hang onto the dreams you’ve still got left.
There’s one more thing I should tell you. The night after she died, Aum and Bam, her friends who were with her but afraid to jump in, phoned me at four in the morning to ask if they could come by our Mercy Centre. When they arrived, they told us they were not frightened but needed to talk about something. Janchira had loved to whistle, and her two friends said they had heard her whistling earlier that night. So we all prayed for Janchira and said that she could come and whistle whenever she wanted, but she should rest in peace. We will not forget her.
We held the cremation ceremony on Saturday evening at the temple. Everyone attended. Everything was proper. We will pray for her again on the thirtieth day and on the 100th day as is customary. After the ceremony, a local man who sometimes sent Janchira to run his errands stopped by our Mercy Centre and asked for his radio-cassette player back, saying he just let her borrow it. We gave it back. It’s worth maybe about 300 baht in a pawnshop.