Her mother was from one of the old Catholic families in Ayutthaya and was born and raised in the water buffalo section of the Slaughterhouse. The second time she was released from jail, she decided she wanted a child. So she found a man for that temporary union and Tik was born.
Just two weeks after childbirth, she was headed for jail again. She brought Tik to our center and asked if I’d baptize her, and I did. Then she asked if we could look after her too, and we said we would as much as we could.
Many moms care for their babies in jail here but it’s not easy, especially for the child. So little Tik was given to us while the courts sorted out her family situation, or at least, tried to. She then went to live with her grandmother until grandmother gave her to someone else. A relative. A friend. She grew up like many slum kids: wherever she could. While her mother did hard time, so did Tik.
We stayed in touch. Watched. Tried to help when we could. Tik attended one of our kindergartens in the slums and completed a few years of government primary school. She learned to read and count, and then started earning her veteran status on the streets. We’d lose track and she’d come back again—for a meal or a place to get out of the storm that became her life.
When she turned twelve—her mother still in prison—Tik went back to living with her grandmother, an incorrigible woman who lied, whined and stole. She told Tik that she had no money and to go out and earn her own. That same year, she was raped by two men. They were later apprehended and at the police station they did what men in that position often do—they offered the police 20,000 baht to settle it. We said no way, we want them to go to jail.
So the men ran away with their wives and that was that, leaving Tik abused, confused and beaten up emotionally. She came to stay with us. We tried, we really did. We gave her a place to sleep and fed her. Over the next year or so, we paid back all of her debts three or four times. One time, a dealer gave her fifty baht to deliver some pills—ya ma in Thai, meaning crazy medicine. Amphetamines. She kept the money and swallowed the pills. It didn’t cost us too much to get her out of trouble that time, but we couldn’t keep doing it. After that, we said we’d only give her money for food and work.
When she was fourteen, we gave her a job in our street kid outreach program. (Over the years, we have learned that streetkids won’t let you in, not if you’re a grownup—the enemy.) We figured the kids would talk to Tik, and many did. She was one of them. She wasn’t paid much and didn’t show up often. She’d come and go like always, and eventually stopped coming.
A few months back, she came looking for money. No big surprise. She’s fifteen now and says she wants to be a model. She’s pretty enough. And thin enough, I suppose, but thin from the streets. But it wasn’t for a course in modeling or a nice dress or to hire a photographer that she asked for 1,000 baht: one minute she was doubled over with stomach cramps and dry heaving, the next minute she was jumping around and laughing. She was high on both amphetamines and heroin, and she need money for more drugs. We knew that. She knew that we knew. We refused to give in to her.
So she went away, and two weeks later she was back. This time, she said her grandmother was sick. I said I didn’t think so. She kept insisting her grandmother was sick, and I said I’d been trying to help her since she was two weeks old and I got tired of it sometimes.
She said, “I get tired of you sometimes too.”
Then she apologized for the way she was dressed. She was wearing a short skirt and a top with a bare midriff, not much more than a bra. She said she was on her way to work at a pub, that next time she would be dressed differently.
Against my best judgment, I gave her 1,000 baht, told her to take her grandmother to the hospital and bring back the change. We haven’t seen her since, but she’ll be back. We don’t know where she lives these days. In the slum somewhere. It’s been fifteen years since her mother first brought her to us and she has always come back.
But of course, she won’t have changed and nobody believes she will. Least of all, Tik herself. She doesn’t have that last quarter ounce of strength or whatever it is that you need to put the past behind. No matter how many times opportunity knocks, nobody appears to be home. The knock isn’t heard. Or it’s ignored. Someone else’s knock is more attractive.
Drugs take care of the pain and what’s missing in her life right now. Tik has never known her mother, who finally gets out of jail soon, and her grandmother is a total nothing. All that Tik has had for fifteen years are her wits and her looks, and both will dim in time.
Tik is one of those kids who falls through the cracks, slips through your fingers—one of the almosts, the what-ifs, the near misses, a poor, sad and heart-breaking could-have-been.
How many of them do we know?