Lindsey Marie M: Children's Day

stirring a giant wok of pork

Children’s Day in Thailand is always the second Saturday in January, however, most schools do their Children’s Day activities the Friday before. In Chiang Rai this included the students not learning the entire week or more before as they prepared dances to perform on the stage. The day of everyone in the community would bring in packs of snack size chip bags that would be distributed to the students when they finished dancing and in several rounds throughout the morning they would hand out 4 or 5 to each student. This resulted in students dressing and dancing sexier than they should at their age, and then being rewarded for it by receiving bags of chips and other snacks. The students also had no control over themselves and the 20-30 things they received would typically be gone that day.

cutting up hundreds of meat balls that are disgusting

an eating contest being run by the 6th graders

Having experienced Children’s Day like I just described above in Chiang Rai I was wondering how my Christian school would handle it. I’m happy to say that it was much more enjoyable and the kids had just as much if not more fun, with less sugary snacks that aren’t good for them anyways. In the morning they had a worship service and then games in the meeting hall, but I missed out on watching that because I was set for kitchen duty. I helped cook HUGE woks of pork with what closer resembled a hoe than a spatula, then cut up tons of the meat balls that Thais love and I couldn’t stand, and have an even bigger aversion to them now that I’ve cut up hundreds of them and seen the insides. They were making guay dtiao, the thai noodles that are so common here for all of the students, so they needed LOTS of everything to feed over 700 people.

Muay Talay, usually done over water, but they did it over straw

working together to climb a greased pole

When the students finished in the meeting hall they came out to the field where they had games set up. The older sixth grade boys were helping set things up and were in charge of running the games for the younger ones. I think it was a way of teaching them responsibility, and also giving them something fun to do to keep them out of trouble and let the younger ones play. I’m always impressed with how they do this and how by doing this the older ones have as much if not more fun than the younger ones. There was musical chairs for the younger kids, a eating competition that the older sixth grade boys ran, a form of boxing where they sit on a bamboo pole and have to knock the other one off. Usually this is done over water, but here they just used straw. There was a six legged competition where they had 5 people tie their legs together and walk across the field, and then the grand event was a greased bamboo pole which they were allowed to try to climb in groups of 4. So, it ended up in towers of boys standing on top of each other trying to get the top one to grab the top. After the younger ones tried and were finished, the older boys were given the chance to try. At first they just messed around, but then the different groups got serious until one team came just inches from the top, and so they traded the top boy who was shorter for another boy who was taller and they were able to reach the top and get the money.

6 legged race

I was planning on not writing much and just letting you see it in pictures, but oops, guess that didn’t happen. I hope you enjoy the explanation and the pics J