When the School Became a Battle

When the new school year opened in May, to Philip's surprise every child suddenly wanted to attend the island's government school — even those who had chosen home-schooling. He soon learned why. Rumours, traced back to a former teammate no longer living on the island, were telling the Moken that home-schooled children "would end up like donkeys," with no future unless they went to the Thai school. A trusted Thai man married to a Moken woman, and later another Moken family, confirmed the source. When Philip tried to gather the community to talk it through, most were too afraid or too angry to come; the man who lends money to the Moken publicly dressed him down, and Philip chose to "take the blows" rather than expose frightened witnesses.

The deeper wound was a realization it forced on him: the Moken children were being pressured to behave culturally like Thai. He wrote to his sending cell that he was certain he had never come to ver-Thai the Moken — to make them Thai — and that changing their culture had never been his purpose. His whole aim, from the beginning, had been to help the Moken help themselves in a foreign land, language, and culture, not to remake them.

Then the darker side of the Ranong children's home surfaced first-hand. Foster boys ran away and arrived with long stories and long tears of being mistreated; when Philip went to sort it out, the warden screamed at him and berated Wud as lazy and bad. He decided to give each of the children he had placed there the choice of whether to stay — and Wud chose to come home and study on the island instead. Looking back, Philip wishes he had never taken the children into that school system at all. Through it all, he wrote, the events kept him on his knees.

Life went on around the storm. The annual beach clean-up drew a Ranong group and the army, who rewarded the hard-working Moken children with rice; the three remaining home-schooled children now read and write Thai and do well at maths; a cooking school (Chinese pork buns, homemade noodles) and soap-making delighted the whole village; blankets and mats arrived from a Bangkok friend for the rainy season; and a French group planted a 2,000-tree cocoa trial, promising to one day teach the children to make chocolate and to leave them trees to harvest. Philip closed by announcing a South Africa visit from late September, and by insisting that hard as it is — "and it is not easy at all" — this is what the Father called him to, and he will stay as long as it is God's will.