End of the Year

So, the school year is over and I experience of mixture of happiness and sadness and uneasiness, something that I think that any teacher can understand. It's happy becaues the damn kids have finally gone home and I don't have to listen to their screeching out Thai love songs on the guitar at 10 o'clock at night. It's sad because the students are leaving and many of them can not come back. A few can't come back because they finished the program, but most of them aren't returning because of the situation in their homes.

A handful of students in my most basic English class aren't coming back because they are joining their tribes army. I didn't realize when I started teaching them that they were just getting a break from toting guns around. At this moment you are probably thinking that they are all a bunch of hardened soldiers, with stone faces and cold eyes. Not at all. They barely look like their ages, which range from 18-21. Most of these kids are baby faced, thin, and very polite. (They are also the ones that like to play the guitar. To hell with guns, these kids should just mass on the border and sing. That would drive everyone away. I swear that even the mosquitoes keep their distance.)

The kids in my second class come from the refugee camps and I am not sure if I will be seeing them either. There is a new rule that I don't understand, but I will do my best to try and explain, so don't quote me here. Apparently if you live in a refugee camp you can either become a full-fledged refugee and accept a UNHCR card. If you do this, you can't leave the camp but you get an opportunity to go to a “third country” (a country that isn't Thailand or Burma). When and where you leave is uncertain.

We are trying to get permission for the kids in the camps to be able to attend CLC even if they choose the UNHCR card, so their future at CLC is a big maybe.

The other option for refugees will be to take a Thai ID card which will allow them to live anywhere in Thailand-- anywhere except the refugee camps, which for most kids is the only home that they have known. Plus they are not full Thai citizens, so they get all the racism that comes along from being Hill Tribe and not having a Thai passport. They also won't be able to leave Thailand, a country where their prospects are pretty grim.

Which would you choose?