Pom Mahakan and the Day of the Child

Indiana Daily Student reporter Rick Newkirk conducted several interviews with IU-Purdue University Indianapolis International Affairs administrators Susan Sutton and Dave Jones, who recently returned from a trip to Thailand. \n***\nChildren's Day, or Day of the Child, is a New Year's celebration of Thailand's youth. But the Dec. 26 tsunami cast a pall over last year's festivities. Still, Saturday, Jan. 8 would be the children's day.\n***\nOne of Bangkok's most celebrated tourist spots is the Grand Palace, an impressive compound of Buddhist temples, government offices and old royal quarters. Built in the late 18th century, the Grand Palace spans about 60 acres, more than three times the size of the grounds of the White House.\nJust past the Palace compound on the warm and humid January day, Bangkok burst with business. Cavalcades of motorcycles zipped through town among tour buses, city buses, a smattering of little cars and tuk-tuks -- motorized three-wheeled taxis named after the sound of their engines.\n"There were lots of throngs of people," Director of the Center of Southeast Asia at IUPUI Dave Jones said. "It was a magnet for local people and tourists." \n***\nDave and Susan would be spending their Day of the Child in a poor village secluded from the rest of Bangkok.\n***\nLess than a mile east of the Grand Palace, an impoverished neighborhood called Pom Mahakan sits nestled in a forgotten nook. The village is so isolated that Jones and Susan Sutton, IUPUI associate dean of international affairs, would have never found it without the help of Michael Herzfeld, a professor emeritus of IU who now teaches anthropology at Harvard University. Herzfeld has studied villages like Pom Mahakan for the past three years and showed the two administrators a less visible enclave of Thai culture.\nThe small village is surrounded on one side by a polluted canal and on the other three sides by Bangkok's old city walls. The dark gray stone partitions stand at about 12 feet tall and bulge a couple feet thick, but Jones said they're "not foreboding."\n"There's something very majestic about them, like they enable this neighborhood," he said.\nInside the walls, Thailand slows down. Enormous, wise old trees enclose the village from above in a cool, shady canopy. A small commons area, no more than 60 by 30 feet with a hard, compacted dirt floor, draws villagers to the center of their modest neighborhood. There are 300 villagers living in 77 houses made of sturdy teak wood. Just as the villagers share their lives, the houses share common walls. The village is no more than four acres in total, less than one-fourth the size of the grounds of the White House, but it has been built to last through the ages.\n***\nDave and Susan sat just inside the wall that separates Pom Mahakan from the rest of Bangkok. From there they watched the Day of the Child.\n***\nThe tsunami, as would any recent tragedy, ruled the day. Jones said the festivities were "respectfully subdued." \nBut still children partook in some of the traditional fun. They played a variation of pin the tail on the donkey. Some of the older children competed in geography contests. The older villagers gathered some small toys for awards. Jones and Sutton were called up periodically to give the children their prizes -- in most cases regardless of whether the child won or lost.\nThe emcee of the day was the neighborhood's president, Pornthep Buranaburidej.\n"It was great child psychology," Jones said. "This was a man of little education but great wisdom."\nAnd for about 45 minutes, the children, on their day, read one-page essays they had written about the tsunami victims. \nSutton said the children, as young as 5 years old, recognized that the tsunami victims, though different, deserved compassion.\n"We heard, 'It doesn't matter that some of the victims are Muslim and we're Buddhists, or that some of them are foreign and we're Thai. It only matters that they lost their homes and their lives,'" she said.\nAfter the activities, one adult wheeled a metal cart into the commons with a special television mounted on top. The TV, tuned to children's programming, was modest in size, no bigger than 17 inches diagonally. What made it special was its rarity -- it was the only television in the village.\n***\nWhen the subdued games were done, villagers swept the commons clean and some prepared to leave the village to work in the tsunami-wrought regions of Thailand.\n***\nJones spoke to one of the men on his way to help in the tsunami relief effort.\n"He was on his way to represent his community," Jones said. "It was a sense of community responsibility. He didn't have ulterior motives. It wasn't calculated for community advancement. It was a manifestation of a community ethos."\nThe people of Pom Mahakan understand devastation and tragedy. About 10 years ago, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, in charge of city planning, decided to have the neighborhood razed to make room for a parking lot for tourists' buses. In response, the villagers scrambled to organize a neighborhood association, name officers and write a petition to the city agency. The neighborhood argued that they should be considered an historic section of Bangkok.\nAnd thanks in part to a letter written to Bangkok's independent newspaper, The Nation, by Sutton that was translated into Thai and handed out through the town on fliers, the administration lifted Pom Mahakan's death sentence indefinitely last fall.\nWhen the tsunami hit, the village was still honeymooning with the concept of liberty.\nSo, in a moment of understanding, the villagers unlaced their dusty purse strings and assembled a gift for the tsunami victims -- about 100,000 baht, or $2,500, a fortune for a few Thai.\n***\nDave and Susan left Pom Mahakan with a new understanding of foreign communities. Though the tsunami cast a cold pall over the Day of the Child, the day filled their hearts with warmth. The next day, Dave left for Indonesia, into the heart of the destruction.\n-- Contact Senior Writer Rick Newkirk at renewkir@indiana.edu.