The slum kids in her kindergarten class call her Miss Teacher Froggy—Kru Kee-it—and every year she tries to get them to call her by her proper title and given name, three beautiful syllables in Thai. But the name somehow sticks to the roof of the mouth and kids forget it. Kru is Thai for teacher and kee-it is the word for a tiny frog that makes a loud noise. From early childhood, her mom called her Froggy, and now, the kids do the same.
It’s a funny name for a hero, but that’s what she is in the Klong Toey slum. She grew up in the Slaughterhouse neighborhood near the water buffalo slaughtering section, alongside the stinky Phra Khannong Canal.
Born cross-eyed, she had reading difficulties in her early school days. Although an only child, her parents couldn’t afford to give her an operation. When she turned eight—the minimum age for the surgery required—a generous doctor performed the operation for free. He even paid for her mom’s bus fare from the Slaughterhouse and back, plus meals, so mom could be with her daughter Froggy in the hospital for two days during her recuperation.
The operation worked. Today she sees normally with 20-20 vision, no glasses required. Few here remember or ever think of her as being cross-eyed. They think of her only as a hero.
I don’t mean that she’s the Rambo type. She’s pretty and svelte. Her eyes sparkle and dance, and her students think she is Wendy and Tinker Bell plus Kanga and Pooh and Tiger, and even Hermione from the Harry Potter books all rolled into one lovely teacher. She’s not a fancy dresser, never owned designer jeans, and mom bought Froggy her first pair of shoes the day she sent her off, crying as we all did, to her first day of kindergarten. She’s real neighborhood.
Actually, she was a kind of Rambo once, a year ago this month, during the scare we had in the Slaughterhouse neighborhood over meningococcal meningitis-heavy-duty industrial-sized words for a life-threatening disease that attacks the brain and spinal chord. Three five-year-old kids in the slum got it, and their bodies were covered with bleeding sores. All bandaged up, they looked like war casualties for months.
Since two of the five-year-olds with the disease came from different ends of the Slaughterhouse, we knew the meningitis wasn’t isolated to one area.
The health authorities took forty saliva samples and seven more kids tested positive but had no symptoms. Three health officials visited our kindergarten and then walked the length of the slum wearing masks and white hospital coats. Scary-looking stuff.
The disease could have been in stagnant water, garbage or even people’s homes, and many of the toilet areas, which were outside and poorly lit.
Miss Teacher Froggy led the brigade. She went from house to house, warning everyone—friends, neighbors, folks she’d known since childhood, as she organized the neighborhood into action. She was everywhere, up to her knees in hazardous filth and pitching garbage into heaps. The Bangkok Metropolitan Authority provided the trucks and we paid for the drivers. Together, the community disposed of six huge, smelly truckloads of garbage in two days. At the same time, we were able to re-panel over 100 toilet areas with new and more hygienic flooring.
Over 400 neighbors joined in the effort. We all took prophylactic medicine and nobody got sick. In the end, the slum was a cleaner place. The folks at the health department said they had never seen a community pull together like that.
The scare finally died down and when the school reopened, Miss Teacher Froggy went back to being a teacher in a slum classroom shack and just an everyday, unsung hero. Maybe this is the most important type—the kind of hero who is always there when neighbors are in trouble or her kids at school are frightened. Some of her students run to her house at night when they need comforting and their moms are still at work. They would stand outside her front door crying and she always lets them in, providing a bed, her old teddy bear, and plenty of love and warmth to get them back to sleep until their moms come home around dawn.
In the classroom, she’s strict: kids keep in order or knuckles get rapped. To graduate from Miss Teacher Froggy’s second year kindergarten class is to earn a badge of honor. She wants her kids to stay in school. And most of them do.
These slum kids are easy marks, you see. Much more vulnerable than you and I. Many are streetwise and tough kids but, starving for affection and love, they’ll believe just about anyone who says something nice to them. They’re innocent and open to predators, even when they grow up, even when they’re slum heroes. It’s easy to break their hearts. It happened to Miss Teacher Froggy.
She met a sweet-talking man from uptown.
As soon as she became pregnant, you can guess who was never heard from again. During her pregnancy, she taught during the week and earned extra cash on weekends by washing squid for 145 baht a day. This work irritated her skin, so she switched to washing pig guts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights with the women of the Slaughterhouse as the men butchered the pork. That paid 200 baht a night.
Now she has a daughter, the glory of her life. She’s still teaching, of course, and many of her students are the children of her lifelong friends. There’s continuity in the slums, you see. It isn’t about transients just passing through.
Miss Teacher Froggy, now twenty-four years old, was a slum kid who stayed in the neighborhood and is making it a better place. Still, at the start of every new school year, she tries to get her new students to call her by her title and given name. It never works. Even the new kids run up to her, give her a hug, and shout, “Hello, Miss Teacher Froggy!”
If you were five, wouldn’t you?