Miss Teacher Froggy called three times in ten minutes. Her messages had been totally clear and blunt as always, but I didn’t get it. The fourth time she phoned, it sunk in—and boy, did her words hurt: “Fire!” Miss Teacher Froggy said. “There’s a fire next to the school. The drug smokers set the slum on fire!” She was angry, crying and shouting, and screaming into the phone with the noise of the fire and the sirens and loud speakers behind her.
“You didn’t listen,” she yelled. “I told you three times that the drug smoke was coming into the school, making our kids sick, making them throw up. Now I’ve got hysterical five-year-olds wanting to run through the fire to save their exercise books!” She slammed the phone down.
Miss Teacher Froggy had taught them that their exercise books were their most precious treasures because they contained their first written letters of the Thai alphabet. Red markings for mistakes, gold stars for getting everything right.
As I approached the Slaughterhouse (five minutes by motorcycle taxi), saw the smoke and met the children, the mob of people and the volunteer firemen, I cried. I’m sixty-three years old and I cried for the kids sick on the drug smoke and now for their ruined exercise books, our school shack and Miss Teacher Froggy. I couldn’t help myself.
It didn’t make any difference if people saw the tears because here in Klong Toey, everything that is truly beautiful happens, including the ugly. Thus, according to our legends and codes, cry if you must. The slum gives you that honor and respect.
The children led me, pushing our way through the crowd to the smoldering drug houses with our scorched and waterlogged school directly behind. Miss Teacher Froggy was standing with Uncle “Longju” Manop. He’s the number two leader in the community and all the water dousing the flames goofed up the black dye in his hair so in minutes, he turned gray-headed. He’s sixty-seven.
Three houses had burned to the ground but were still smoldering, so the volunteer firefighters continued hosing down the school, lest the sparks from the houses burst into flames and burn down the school. Uncle “Longju” Manop said in Thai, “Awt-tone mai da:z” (I can’t take no more). “They’ve hurt our kids!”
Then he told his wife to call his son, who’s a soldier, and tell him to bring his friends—Blood and Broken Bones.
The fire was extinguished and the school was saved, but not the exercise books. Water and smoke destroyed every one of them, along with everything else inside and outside the building.
Every child knew how the fire had started. It was an act of arson, spite—revenge, really, against the druggies living next to our school. A middle-level guy, the yee pua (the guy who gets things done and knows all the angles) had delivered drugs to them on credit. You know, smoke the amphetamines now and pay later. The drug smokers had not paid. So the order was given: “Burn ’em out!”
Let me tell you how they did it. Uncle “Longju” Manop and a couple of neighbors raise baby chickens, training them to be fighting cocks. The roosters are kept apart under big rattan home baskets turned upside down. And when the order came down, the dealers freed Uncle Manop’s roosters, doused their rattan baskets in petrol, kicked down the door of the drug smokers’ shack and threw in the burning baskets, which lit the mosquito nets and started the fire.
Drugs have always been in the Slaughterhouse neighborhood. It’s beside a port where the long-haul truckers park their eighteen-wheelers. So there is no place where drugs are more accessible and more in demand, and subsequently, there is no place in all Thailand that hates drugs more. The citizens of Klong Toey have been fighting drugs for thirty-five years and they were winning until more and more uniforms of all colors switched sides.
Sure, even the tainted uniforms still fight drugs. They have their quotas, after all. Couple of days ago, they arrested Miss Ning. Caught her with two pills and five marked bills. But she’s been in a daze for over a week. Pathetic really, didn’t know where she was or who she was. Maybe prison will save her life.
But smalltime arrests aside, the drug scene went wild and soon, twenty mid-level dealers started realizing personal profits of 10,000 baht in twenty-four hours. I don’t think there’s a household in Klong Toey that is free of drugs. Somebody in the family is on drugs, in jail or dead. Out of 130,000 residents in the slum area, about 500 are in jail on drug charges. And a number of them are grandmothers who confessed and took the rap for their daughters so that the daughters can stay free and raise their children while grandma does the time. That’s common here.
So we fight the war how, when and where we can. I don’t agree with Uncle Manop that Blood and Broken Bones can wash clean our children’s exercise books. But many others do.
Only days before this fire, Uncle Manop and Teacher Froggy, in the name of the elected community leaders, had plastered posters all over the Slaughterhouse telling people if they saw anyone selling drugs, to call the Port Authority Police and also phone our own community volunteer watchmen. If no one came, they were told to call Radio Thailand to tell listeners what was happening and to write letters to the national police. Uncle Manop wrote two himself. His son, the soldier, and his son’s friends didn’t show up, by the way. After Uncle Manop told his wife to call them, Miss Teacher Froggy whispered in her ear not to do so. Miss Teacher Froggy thought there had to be another way.
Miss Teacher Froggy showed the whole community how to fix problems a few years back when there was an outbreak of meningitis and she organized a cleanup that took truckload after truckload of infected garbage out of the Slaughterhouse, stemming the outbreak and perhaps also saving lives.
Uncle Manop is a retired manager of the abattoir that gives the neighborhood its name.
Asking the two of them to help, we organized a community meeting for the next evening after the fire. More than 300 parents attended. I wore all my priest robes, which I never do in the slums. But this time I wanted to make a formal statement—that this was a war against the drugs hurting our children. We weren’t declaring an all out war, not against all drugs; that would be too much. But it was to be a here-and-now war against the scums living in front of our school and directly harming them. My white robes were my battle regalia. I told everyone they could join us or not—it was up to them. However, if they wanted a civil society and safe schools for their kids, they had to go to war with us.
Otherwise, they could take their children home and never come back. We could close the school, move the teachers to another slum school. I was ranting—told them our children were scared and any power we had to protect them had to be used.
My rant continued: this war would re-establish an ethical code for us. I told them the drug dealers and smokers were saying that education wasn’t important—that our children’s future wasn’t important.
So what did they decide to do?
They not only said they were with us; they also drafted an unbelievable document. The first of its kind in Slaughterhouse history. It said the drug smokers were no longer welcome in our slum and we forbid them to rebuild their houses. One hundred and three homeowners out of 114 were present.
Of course, all the children wanted to sign it, and those who couldn’t write their names drew pictures! Some of the elderly made barely legible scrawls. Others just laid down their fingerprints smudged in ink. Then Uncle Manop pricked his finger for a blood smear over his signature. That was the tocsin and drum beat. We were at war.
We asked for help from the big guys in the Special Department for Crimes against Children and they were with us, too. They ordered the local police to stand guard while the community tore down what remained of the three fire-ravaged houses. The cops came as promised and remained until the houses were gone and cement was poured in their foundation and the entire area surrounding the school.
Residents identified the bad guys both by name and police mug shots—the dealers, the smokers and the guy who ordered the gang to burn them out.
We went to the port authority on whose land the Slaughterhouse sits, asking that if the former residents requested permission to rebuild, to say no.
I guess the word went out. The bad guys ran away.
They’re back now, but always slinking around in the shadows. Never near the school. Never daring to approach children. The fire was in April. Today, there stands a refurbished school. And in place of the torn down homes, we now have a large cemented area surrounded by a chain link fence, forming a drug free zone—sort of a “slum patio”—that is bringing more light into the repainted and refitted classrooms, and giving the community an open space for weddings and ceremonies.
Each morning, Uncle Manop waters the potted plants lining the kindergarten playground. The laughter of school kids has returned as they struggle once again to earn gold stars.
There are hundreds of heroes in this story, not just the two names I’ve mentioned. Even when Uncle Manop and Miss Teacher Froggy first disagreed about what to do, they and all the heroes of our community came together to find their own inner strength in their drug war.
In sharp contrast, during the government’s recent national war on drugs, six people were killed on the streets of Klong Toey. Two more are missing. No shooters have been identified. Our first drive-by shootings!
The government’s war has changed the rules of the game. Prices are up from about sixty baht to 250 baht a pill in the daytimes and 150 at night. (When night falls and it’s easier to traffic drugs, prices go down.) Pills are more difficult to find. Dealers are more cautious.
Heroin is back in town along with needles and AIDS. The new cocktail in “time of need” is beer at three big bottles for 100 baht along with a moonshine whiskey chaser; or in extreme need, the smoke inhaled from burning mosquito coils with crushed up paracetamol (Tylenol) pills.
And the kindergarten kids watch. They watch Uncle Manop and Miss Teacher Froggy. They watch the dealers and the smokers and the uniforms.
Who will make the next move?
The kids watch and wait.