For children on an island off the southern province of Ranong, going to school has become a daily adventure. For years, they have had to ride improvised rafts and wade through knee-deep water to cross a lagoon that separates their community from their school.
They were promised a bridge years ago to facilitate their travel, but what they are left with are just empty concrete columns standing idly in the water.
Now that Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin will hold his mobile Cabinet meeting in Ranong next week, the villagers of Payam Island hope that their children’s plight will finally get noticed.
The island has a population of around 200, including 50 children, who are known as Moken sea nomads and subsist mainly on fishing and selling labor.
A Thai PBS news team visited the popular tourist island early this week and witnessed how children in school uniforms struggle to get to school by riding on a makeshift raft that takes them to the other side of the lagoon before finishing the rest of the journey on foot by wading through knee-deep water. Some smaller children were given piggy-back rides by their parents trudging through the seawater instead.
This has been a common scene for years, but it has gone viral in recent days after pictures of these children’s haphazard journey were posted on social media only two weeks before the Cabinet meeting in Ranong, a southern province on the Andaman coast.
The continuing plight of these children is a result of a dispute over the construction of a bridge across the lagoon almost 10 years ago. Local authorities objected to its construction on the grounds that the area is within the Payam national forest reserve.
The Department of Marine and Coastal Resources, however, insisted that it had no objection to the construction of a bridge if it is first approved by the Cabinet. However, it’s still unclear whether the issue is on the agenda of the Cabinet meeting.
“If a bridge had been built years ago, our life would have been much better,” said a local villager who urged the Srettha government to make a decision on the bridge construction.
Villagers told Thai PBS that a recent incident in which a raft ferrying a group of schoolchildren capsized has prompted them to renew their call for a bridge to be built.
The adventure that their children have to go through daily is only one of the villagers’ grievances. Most of the villagers do not have Thai citizenship and are subsequently denied job opportunities and social welfare benefits.
“Some are lucky enough to have Thai IDs, but not their children. They said we need to have DNA tests first. But we don’t have the money to do it. It’s already tough enough to go through daily. How can we afford to have DNA tests?” said one of the villagers.
There have been no immediate official comments from the Srettha government on the predicaments the Moken villagers are facing, but the Interior Ministry said on its recent Facebook page that Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul will use the Ranong Cabinet meeting to find ways to address them.
