Mother's Day 2014

Mother’s Day 2014

At Ban Rang Krathai School

This post is about three months overdue. Mother’s Day in Thailand is on August 12^th, the birthday of HRH Queen Sirikit. This year, the royal birthday fell on a Tuesday, giving us a four-day weekend, Saturday through Tuesday. That was the weekend I spent in Sukothai, described in two blog posts published earlier. For various reasons I didn’t get back to Mother’s Day until now. Better late than never?

At our school, Mother’s Day was observed on the Friday before the weekend, so students spent much of Thursday making Mother’s Day cards or flower arrangements and decorating the cafeteria. Below you see students working on the decorations around a portrait of the Queen that was hung especially for the occasion. This particular portrait of her is a very popular one, seen perhaps more often than any other.

Student on ladder adjusting ribbons

Trying to get that rosette just right

Students ironing yards, er, meters of tulle fabric

On Friday morning, the first order of business was to line up to give gifts to monks: packages of rice and other food, bottled water, juice, soy milk, kanom . . . . The sixth-grade students in the picture below were amusing themselves while waiting for the monks to arrive.

 After all nine monks had filed past the row of students and teachers to receive the gifts, they opened the Mother’s Day ceremony with chanting and prayers.

When the monks had finished chanting, there was a ritual of lighting candles and pouring water at the altar in front of HRH the Queen’s portrait. Virtually every formal meeting in Thailand opens this way, by having key individuals pay respect to the Buddha and to the Royal Family.

Next, the emcee invited the students’ mothers to the front of the room, by grade level –  preschoolers first. The children then came to sit with their mothers, as you see in the picture below.

When students in the higher grades come forward, they bow down and touch their foreheads to the floor three times, then hug their mothers and give them cards and bouquets. The public display of reverence to their mothers is very emotional for the students. Quite a few tears are shed.

 Some students’ mothers couldn’t be there, so teachers stood in for them. I sat on the floor and hugged several of my students whose mothers weren’t there, including one whose parents died when he was very young. I don’t have a picture of that though.

After each grade level had come forward to honor their mothers, student dancers performed for everyone. By now the hand and arm movements of traditional Thai dance are probably familiar to you.

Some schools have more elaborate programs for Mothers’ Day. At my school last year, the older students did skits, sang songs, and recited poems, and the marching band played several ear-splitting numbers. My current school is much smaller, with only 200 students, so the pool of performers is limited.

Finally, here is a slightly blurry picture to show you what was done with the tulle the students were ironing the day before. The words above my head say Wan Mae (=Mother's Day), followed by the date. Mothers could sit here to have their picture taken with their children.

When Thais ask me about Mother’s Day in America, they want to know whose birthday is celebrated on this occasion. No one’s, I say, and explain that it’s on a Sunday in May, celebrated mostly in people’s homes or in restaurants. This surprises them. But it's all in a day's work:  Part of our responsibilities as PC volunteers is to help people in the country we're serving understand more about American life and culture.