When 3 became 4

I’ve got an introduction to make.

Back right, the kid not in green? This is my new student. You'll know him as Jude.

He joined Grade 1 over a month ago, just after the October break, speaks the tiniest amount of English, and is very, very sporty. He has also been pseudo adopted by the oldest boy in the school, who plays basket ball with him and jokes with him and insists they sit next to each other in fun reading. Given that this older kid is by turns cheeky, rude, apathetic and really very smart (If a bit lacklustre in applying it) all the teachers are finding it mildly hilarious.

Jude is also a great advocate of cuddling. Which would be fine. Except, as I mentioned, he’s very sporty. And always seems to have a jacket or jumper on that he can never be persuaded to remove.

It’s always a slightly sweaty cuddle.

But he is the only kid in Grade 1 or 2 who can do a decent unassisted sit-up with any speed. Tradeoffs, I guess.

He’s picking up English a bit faster now, though he does still turn to one of the others at least once a lesson and go ‘What is she saying? What is she saying? I don’t understand!’ He also hates drawing, and every time we do it he goes to great pains to try and get me to relinquish him from such torture. He is yet to develop a ‘just get through the pain!’ attitude. Metaphorical or otherwise; his toe was a bit purple on Tuesday, and he spent the whole of school picking at it and looking at it and telling me about it. And then promptly forgot about it come break times.

Before he came here he lived somewhere further south, near Bangkok. As I understand it, he was living with his grandfather because of problems with more immediate family, mother excluded. She was actually the one who had the grandfather look after him. Then the flooding happened.

It was a bit surreal, when the flooding we’d heard and read a lot about but not seen became so close, and really very personal. The children at the school aren’t just students, they’re a kind of extended family. Some don’t have parents, or they’re absent. Those that do have families are mostly living at the River, where there are several families, and so are very used to this great-big-community feel. So we kind of become almost-parents, or big cousins or aunts and uncles. The kids don’t finish the day and go home and then that’s it, we stop thinking about them. They are constantly in our thoughts, and we’re always sharing anecdotes or progress in a subject or worries to be mulled over. So things that affect them affect us too.

Jude's family was affected by the flooding. His grandfather died, and so his mother brought him back to Chiang Mai. She enrolled him in this little school of ours, and she makes every effort to help improve his English, and makes sure we buy him dinner to send home with him so if she was late he could still eat, and designed and had built a little bamboo house for him in the front porch with a bookcase and curtains and a table because he refuses to go inside the actual house until she gets home from work.

He tells me he’s six. This little six year old of mine has just had his world shattered and patched together again.

He cries, all the time, about silly small things and things I can’t change and things I don’t understand or know at all, and he does so with little whines and great heaving sobs; sometimes it’s frustrating, a cry for attention with fake tears and at those times I want to tell him to grow up and stop being a baby, but most the time he honestly can’t help it and can’t stop and I sit there and hold his hands and wipe his face and use what little broken Thai I know or the intermediary of the other children to say ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, please stop crying, I’m sorry, he said sorry, she said sorry, you said sorry, it’s alright, I’m not mad, please stop crying, it’s okay’ over and over, in a litany of comfort that never seems to work, and often I just want to sit with him and hug him and wipe his tears until he stops, but I can’t, because I have three other children and I have to teach and I have no idea what to do.

Do I let him sit there and tough it out? Do I find something separate for the other kids to do without me? Do I send him to the office, or Lucy, or a Thai teacher, and say ‘stay there until you calm down’?

You should see him when he smiles. He’s so full to bursting with it that it becomes infectious. Every time he walks past the room where the English teachers do their planning he pops his head in the door and says ‘Good morning Miss Emma!’ ‘Good afternoon Miss Emma!’ and sees how far he can push his luck, how long he can stay by the door or the window and smile and wave and giggle. Every time we do PE, or basket ball club, or he gets a ball during free time he becomes so focused that everything else becomes unimportant, and everything he does well becomes a triumph, a reason to cheer and ramble at me in Thai.

I want him to smile all the time. Not just in those moments when he’s not crying.

I want your prayer for this, for him. Even without the Thai-English blockade sitting there I wouldn’t be able to do this by myself, wouldn’t be able to help him get through this and grow past it and use his talents, his great aptitude for sports and math and help it flourish.

Pray for my little Jude.