Dear Everyone

Our children are home – happy/ beginning summer school vacation. Final exams finished last week – Four hundred finished kindergarten three (going into the first grade) from our 22 kindergartens where 2,000 slum children joyfully attend. Here is a letter from one of the graduates: thought you might want to share.

Letter @ Graduation

Dear Mummy

My teacher is helping me write this to you as I am six years old now, and this is my first letter. And I don’t know all the big words, and spelling, so my teacher will make it nice for me. Also, a picture of me and my brother Jimmy and Granny on her three wheel cart for gathering ‘gather-ables’ with me sitting with her on the driver’s seat in the cart. Both of us were so proud.

Oh mummy, I wish you could have been here to see me get my graduation certificate from third year of Kindergarten from my teacher, Miss Boontam she’s like a second mummy to me, like granny because you, my real mummy have gone to prison. I don’t blame you – it’s just that I miss you so very much and me and my teddy bear hug each other each night and cry together, thinking of how you used to hug us Mummy. But I know that you will come back some day – you promised.

So, I will be a good girl with my brother Jimmy who graduates next year. This year he is in second kindergarten and he misses you too. And he cries at night a lot, but would never tell anyone, or let anyone see him, because someone told him that boys don’t cry. But that’s not true, so sometimes I let him hold my teddy bear also to help him go to sleep.

My teacher said this is a nice letter and a nice picture, and she said that she hopes the people in the prison who wear the uniforms will let you read my letter and see my picture. I am sure they will.

Love Lisa – your daughter – now graduated from kindergarten. And P.S. My teacher says it is really difficult to graduate from kindergarten and that I passed all my grades, so you, mummy can be proud of me. And I need a pair of shoes to go to the first grade, but I know you will buy me a pair when you get out of prison.

Your loving daughter Lisa.