A Year's Visa After Nine Years

The island's cashew-nut festival came round again, and Philip was asked to help with the English announcements while the Moken children pitched in — their willingness making a strong impression on the new island chief. That same weekend a gift arrived that would change daily life: a well-kept boat, donated by its former German owner, launched with the help of a visiting YWAM team and fitted with a 30-horsepower outboard. Then, "as if everything had to happen in one weekend," twenty chickens arrived — a small milestone that delighted the children, who took over their care and now collect fifteen to seventeen eggs a day.

Over the Easter school holidays the children finally overcame their fear of two new things: the cinema in Ranong and scuba diving — first just a mask, then a regulator, then hanging over the boat's edge with their faces in the water. Now they want to dive every week. Philip began dreaming aloud about training them to guide tourists on open-water dives, and teaching some of the boys motorbike mechanics. Wud, once too frightened even to sit his grade-6 exams, decided he wanted high school, passed the Ranong entrance exam well — and not just barely — and enrolled.

The headline came from the welfare department: after inspecting his work and formally approving it, they asked immigration to extend both his visa and his work permit by a full year — valid to April 2018, his first year-long visa after more than nine years in Thailand. With his own boat he was now able, in a single day, to help a Moken father register a newborn, visit the clinic and island chief, and renew his own visa — work that usually took a week. The month's sorrow was the death of Ning, a Moken woman worn to skin and bone, who died at dawn just after finally deciding she wanted to live, leaving a husband and five children.