Visiting the Children at the Migrant School
For those of you that have followed our blog closely, you may remember that Amber and I visited a migrant school/orphanage during our first few days of exploring Mae Sot back in October. The sight of those few dozen children, living in total poverty but smiling and laughing anyway, lingered in our minds and in our hearts.
Throughout December, Amber and Sofia began visiting this migrant school/orphanage regularly. I call it both a school and an orphanage because the children’s parents are not necessarily deceased. Some of their parents were forced to abandon them there since they could no longer afford to feed them or care for them, because their jobs in factories and sweat shops pay them only $1 or $2 per day. The children may have been born in Burma, or they may have been born in Thailand, but it doesn’t really matter. They are not citizens of either country, so they have no home other than the orphanage.
Amber and Sofia delivered clothing, coloring books and crayons, soap, shampoo, medicines, and anything else the children might need. But more importantly, they gave the children affection, attention, and love.
Amber then taught the young women at her ethnic minority school how to sing a few Christmas songs in English. On December 14, Amber took her students to visit the migrant school/orphanage to sing the carols to the children there. In addition, we brought them toys like a soccer ball, a bowling ball and pins, etc. I went along on the visit to take photos, and it was a very emotional day. Some of Amber’s students got upset when they saw the children, because it reminded them of their own poverty-stricken villages inside Burma. But the children were happy and played for hours. Our visit was probably the closest experience the children will get to Christmas this year, because somehow it seems Santa Claus skips over this part of the world.
**Note: As always, for the safety and security of our ethnic minority students that we teach, there are no photos of Amber’s students below.
