4.Aunt Ying Comes Home

Our neighbor, Aunt Ying, came home after twelve years and nine months in prison. She had been sentenced to life for selling meth in the village. When she first arrived, she moved carefully, as if measuring the space around her. Her shoulders were relaxed but her eyes stayed alert, like someone who had learned how to live within walls. Before prison, she never thought much about where she slept or how she lived. She fell asleep wherever she felt tired, under a fan, in front of her TV, sometimes on a floor full of things. When life feels wide open, you forget how sacred small things can be.

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In prison, her world was reduced to a small concrete cell. Yet in that narrow space, she discovered freedom through order. She swept every morning, folded her blanket neatly, and made her corner clean. When the world gives you so little, she told me, you learn to care for what you have. Tidiness became a kind of peace. Inside those walls, she learned yoga, flower arrangement, metta meditation, and traditional massage. Learning helped her stay human. She spoke without bitterness. Prison, she said, was not freedom, but it was a place to learn.

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She earned several massage certificates, but she burned them all when she returned home because she felt ashamed. I told her she did not need to hide. She is not her past. I hired her to help clean sugarcane for our sugar making. She is someone whose toenails are always clean. Her hair is neatly combed. Her clothes are simple but graceful, like her spotless house. One afternoon she walked up the hill to tell me that her son in law had left. He still used meth and had hit her daughter. She told him, I have never hit my daughter. You cannot hit her either. He left angry. I think she is brave. By standing up for her daughter, she protected her grandchildren from growing up believing violence is love.

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She also worries about the environment. Behind her house runs a small canal that turned black while she was gone. Her nieces and nephews no longer fish or play there because people from another district come at night to dump truckloads of waste. She told me, You seem well educated. Can we work together to make the water clear again? I told her, Yes, we can. 

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In our community, we often call our neighbors “Auntie” or “Uncle,” even when they are not related to us. It is a gesture of warmth and respect that makes the boundaries between families softer. This is one thing I love deeply about local culture. It keeps people connected. It offers a sense of belonging, especially to those who might otherwise be left out. For someone like Aunt Ying, who could have been easily ostracized as a “dangerous person,” this shared way of seeing one another as kin made her return less lonely. People still greet her. They call her “Auntie” with genuine respect. And that small word helps her belong again.

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I hope she will one day share her story with the children in our Dare to Dream project, not as a warning about drugs but as a reminder that people can fall, learn, and rise again. The children here see addiction everywhere, in their families, in the fields, and in the streets. Perhaps when they meet her, they will see that life can begin again, even after years behind walls.

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Watching her rebuild her life reminds me that change does not always come with noise or celebration. Sometimes it begins quietly, when one woman decides to clean her corner, protect her daughter, speak for the river behind her house, and begin again. That is why I want to work with her closely. Her story is not just her own. It belongs to this village, to the mothers and daughters still struggling, and to the children who deserve to see that redemption is real. At Lorliang Cheewa, this is where hope begins, with one person choosing to do good again and again until it spreads like clear water returning to a muddy canal.

5.Tum and the Thread of Connection

Tum is twenty eight. He is blind and spends most of his time inside a small concrete house near the paved road. The house is also my aunt’s beauty shop, filled with the faint scent of shampoo and hair dye. The hum of hair dryers blends with the roar of passing motorbikes and the occasional truck that makes the windows tremble. He is my aunt’s stepson, and his father, my uncle, drinks heavily.

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Tum’s life moves quietly. He wakes up, rolls tobacco, lights a cigarette, and sits for a long time listening to the sound of the road. Then he takes a nap. Sometimes he walks carefully along the paved road to my mother’s shop to buy more tobacco. He trails one hand along the cold metal guardrail, using it as his guide. When my uncle’s dogs start barking violently, he knows he is close. He counts fifteen more steps, turns toward the smell of fried snacks and sugar, and stops right in front of my mother’s shop.

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When I see him, I take his hands gently and tell him who I am and what I am wearing. It might sound simple, but I learned this from Senator Crystal Asige in Kenya. She said that to make the world truly inclusive, we must introduce ourselves to blind people and describe who we are and what we look like. It is not pity. It is respect. It is a small act that says, I see you, and I want you to see me too.

He does not have a phone, and his world is mostly sound and touch. The warmth of the sun on his face tells him it is morning. The smell of frying oil means my mother’s shop is open. He knows which plants are near the steps by their scent.

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He has been trying his best to help out. He washes dishes, does the laundry, and waters the plants in front of the house. These are small things, but they are his quiet way of staying connected to life.

I often imagine what it feels like to live beside a busy road and still be invisible. To hear the world moving, the engines, the laughter, the footsteps, and the voices, but never see the faces behind those sounds. To know that life is happening all around you and still feel left out of it.

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Once I helped my aunt report her husband’s violence to the police. Everyone told me not to interfere. They said they would get back together anyway, and they did. But I do not regret helping. Sometimes doing the right thing does not fix the story, but it keeps your humanity intact.

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Later, I called the local health center and asked the director to connect Tum with someone from the disability office. When I explained his situation, one official asked me, "Are there still people like you who want to do good things?" I told him, "There are many. The world cannot stay kind unless we keep trying."

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In small Thai villages, people like Tum often fade quietly into the background. It is not because others are unkind. Life here revolves around survival. People wake before dawn to tap rubber, sell palm fruit, and feed their families. The day leaves little space to notice what does not shout for attention. But this is what I want to change.

Through the Lorliang Cheewa Foundation, I want us to learn how to see again, not only the children or farmers or women we already help, but also the people who have quietly disappeared from sight.

In Thai culture, we often speak softly. We live by kreng jai, a sense of respect and care that keeps us from troubling others. It is a beautiful idea, but sometimes it keeps us apart. We stay polite when compassion needs us to act. I want us to build a different habit, one that listens, reaches out, and says, I see you, even when the world forgets to look.