The Global Fund For Children

Mobile Playrooms for Migrant Children in Northern Thailand

• By Hoa Duong Piyaka on January 12th, 2011
• Category: Blog, East and Southeast Asia

Chiang Mai, Thailand – Chiang Mai, Thailand – In the small art center at the edge of town, a dozen young staff members are busily packing boxes, wrapping up art supplies, and loading the van out front. The group is preparing for a weekend art training in a nearby town. The office has a lived-in feel and is slightly disheveled, with color and murals everywhere, much like an artist’s studio.

In just over eight years, this community-based organization has grown from an art project with ten children and two volunteer teachers to its current incarnation—a physical center complete with mobile classrooms and playrooms that travel to migrant communities to teach skills and appreciation for art and play. At present, this organization works with nearly 600 children per month in marginalized communities in the cities of Chiang Mai and Mae Sot, and in the Mae Sariang and Kun Kyaw refugee camps. In addition to offering weekly art courses and entrepreneurship lessons in art crafts, the teachers facilitate and train other teachers to incorporate art lessons into the standard curriculum of mainstream schools. They believe art practice is an essential tool for child development.

Most of the organization’s students are children living in refugee camps along the Thailand-Burma border and children of migrant workers, many of whom are seasonal agricultural laborers or construction workers. To accommodate the unpredictable and irregular hours of the migrant workers, the art teachers hold classes outside of school hours, either in the evening or on the weekend. In Chiang Mai, children attend classes in the construction-worker camps that they call home.

I arrive at one of the construction-worker camps one weekday night with my host from the organization. The driver takes us in a car full of art supplies and pulls off onto a dirt road. As we round the bend and back up into a parking spot, I spy in the rearview mirror dozens of children running up to our vehicle. Some are barefoot, some have flip-flops, and most are wearing soiled clothing. All are smiling and cheering. They are very familiar with this organization, and they know exactly what to do when the large plastic bins exploding with coloring books, toys, crayons, puzzles, and storybooks tumble out. There is a frenzy of reaching hands, followed by pure unstructured playtime. There is surprisingly little fighting; if a child wants to play with a toy, the other children share freely.

Refugee and migrant children encounter few options for educational advancement. While migrant children are permitted to attend Thai schools, all children, regardless of their age and educational level, must start a new school at the primary 1 level, putting migrant children at a severe disadvantage and creating an environment for further social discrimination. Itinerant parents change locations frequently in search of work, obliging their children to begin school again and again. This results in a cycle of migrant children largely abandoning school by age 12 to help their parents in their seasonal work. National adult education programs generally start at age 15 and above, so there is a gap in the educational and training framework. In Mae Sot, the number of migrant children in need of schooling is estimated to be close to 50,000, and the Thai system is insufficient to absorb this great a number. Informal education centers have cropped up, but they are not accredited and it is therefore difficult for their students to transition to mainstream Thai schools later. Refugee children have even fewer options as they are not permitted to attend Thai schools.

The director of this center has studied at the top universities in Thailand, focusing on cognitive and emotional expression in sexually abused children, and has taught visual arts to abused children, in addition to running arts program for women prisoners. He is an engaged artist who saw the need for providing migrant communities with an alternative educational program placing art at the center of the curriculum.