Oh, The Places I'll Go!: Hataikarun Home

"Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven." -Henry Ward Beecher

New and I

Last week, I visited the Hataikarun Home with a group of Thai and other international students from ABAC. Hataikarun Home is an organization run by Catholic nuns and priests that houses young children of the local area who are either orphaned, have unfit parents, or whose parents are too poor that they can no longer care for the children. I, along with about 8 other Loyola students, woke up bright and early on a Sunday morning to be on the bus at 7 am. We met up with some other students at the Bang Na campus and then began our drive out into the countryside to find Hataikarun Home.
Once we got there, I got felt unsure about my decision to go, because I felt extremely awkward. Sometimes I am very good with kids, but other times they tend to make me a little nervous. We arrived at the home and with countless kids running around, I wasn't entirely sure how to approach them or what to say. All of a sudden, a 3 year-old boy wandered over to me. I grabbed his little hand and asked him what his name was. He didn't say, but I saw a name tag that had "New" on it. New looked up and smiled at me, so I picked him up- that was the beginning of my love for this little 3 year old!
For some reason, New really seemed to get attached to me, and I spent most of the morning carrying him around and speaking to him in my extremely limited Thai. New also got very attached to Vince, another Loyola student. It was so cute to watch New running around having a blast with all of us. It was also funny to have my "maternal instincts" kick in when I was with New (for a while there, I wasn't too sure if I even HAD maternal instincts....) I was having so much fun watching him on the playground, yet I always felt the need to keep an eye on him, just in case....

Later in the day, I got paired up with an older boy, probably about 13 years old (I don't exactly know how to spell his name). We were supposed to practice English with our partners, so I was trying to teach him phrases and words in English while he tried to teach me in Thai. This was the first time in Thailand when the language barrier truly frustrated me to no end. I felt helpless, useless even, because I could barely communicate with this boy. My frustration mounted when I saw him struggling to find any English word he knew, because I wanted so badly to help him learn, yet I was just so unequipped to do so. I felt even more like I had failed him when I saw some of my friends interacting much more successfully with their partners. Despite how I was feeling, this boy did not lose faith in me like I lost faith in myself. He continued to keep smiling at me, and did his absolute best to make our lesson successful.
At the end of the day, the partners wrote letters to each other. We didn't get to read them to each other because one was in English and one was in Thai, so I guess I'll never know for sure, but I can only hope that based off of the smile on that little boy's face, that it must've said something good in it- because mine certainly did!

It never fails to amaze me that those who have so little, can teach us so much.