If you go on to YouTube and search for the Good Child Foundation, you will most likely unearth a number of Thai school children singing popular Irish ballads in perfect English with faultless diction. You’ll be as amused and entertained by these videos as the thousands of internet users that have shared them across the world wide web making them a phenomenon. Most people take YouTube videos with a pinch of salt and tend to forget them once they have discovered the next link that has caught their attention. But the story behind these particular videos is one that will warm the heart, alert your inner activist and could have you weeping at the immense level of good some people are capable of achieving.
Paul Lennon arrived in Thailand twenty years ago from Northampton in England and married his wife Pun in April 1991. They moved to England and lived there for eleven years before relocating to the Chanthaburi province in 2002 to start a family, Chanthaburi being the area where Pun grew up and also the area where they wed. In February 2003 when they discovered that their first born child suffered from Down Syndrome they, like any other parents, were frightened and worried about what the future would hold for him. Paul knew nothing of Down Syndrome, his wife Pun had seen a documentary on the condition, but neither could have imagined how having a child with Down’s could effect their lives. I spoke to Paul about his reaction when his son was born. “After Berni was born Pun was taken off to a room and because Berni wasn’t well he was taken off to a special room, the nurses invited me down to see him, and there were about a dozen babies lined up. As soon as I saw Berni I collapsed because he looked so poorly. He didn’t even look human, he was totally different to all the other babies and I just collapsed on the floor, they had to get smelling salts to bring me round.” It was only after medical testing that the staff in the hospital called the new parents back to inform them that Berni had Down Syndrome. “Pun sort of knew what Down Syndrome was and I was immediately on the internet. The health fears were the first thing. Berni had pneumonia five times and we were worried about Berni’s heart and his hearing, it was total devastation. When your first child is born you think about all the great things for them in the future, where they’ll go to university, will he be good at sports and a lot of that is destroyed in one go.” Paul is incredibly honest when talking about his mental state at that time. “When I first heard Berni had Down Syndrome I wished I’d never come to Thailand from England twenty years ago, I wished I’d never met my wife, I felt so sorry for my wife that we’d had a child like this, all completely ridiculous thoughts.” When speaking to Paul you can quickly sense this is a man that loves his family dearly and is passionate about the awareness of his sons condition. “I’d love to be an inspiration to parents that have just had a Down Syndrome child and tell them the absolutely ridiculous thoughts I had when Berni was born, because he’s the pride and joy of our lives. He’s a star; nothing in life compares to him. The problem was we were thinking in the future before he was born, I think our fear was more from expectation, but having a down syndrome child taught us to live in the present, we don’t think about the future now, we work on the present day everyday.” Seven years on and his son Berni is a happy school going little boy that stands for the Thai national anthem everyday with the rest of his class mates and enjoys playing with his younger brother Steve. Paul may well live in the present everyday, but his initiative and his actions have helped pave the way for a once unattainable future for Down Syndrome children in rural Thailand.
When Berni came to be of school going age Paul and his wife knew it would be a struggle to find a school that would take him. All the local government funded schools refused him due to his condition as did the local Catholic school ran by nuns. I asked Paul what options were then available to him? “How it is, is that if you have a Down Syndrome child in a city, then there’s special needs schools that the child can go to. But if you live a rural area like Chantiburi, we’re about fifty kilometers from the nearest town, there’s nothing. In Thailand Down Syndrome children don’t go to regular schools, regular schools won’t accept them mainly because of the extra work involved and the government don’t give any extra support. Apart from five hundred bhat (about £10) a month for severely disabled children, which you can apply for, there is no financial support. Parents with a Down’s child in the rural areas have two choices, either keep that child at home, then the child is not educated and won’t ever mix with other children, this can put enormous strain on the family. There is no welfare state in Thailand, if families don’t work they don’t eat and someone has to care for the child. The other option is that they can send their child off to the Rachanugoon residential school, which is basically a mental home 100 km away in Rayong City. That’s a very a difficult journey for poor farming families in this area. A lot of the time you will find children sent to the home will not be visited by their families because of the expense of getting there. Those were the only options available until now.”
In 2004 the Triamsuksa Nayai-am School was opened by Mr Praman Sarakoses, the former Police Superintendent of the province of Chanthaburi, and his wife Mrs Yuvaret Sarakoses. They had shared a life long ambition to improve the education for the less fortunate in the area. As a police officer all of his career, he had the vision to see that education was the best way to keep the youth away from crime and improve the opportunities of the whole community. In 2008 Mrs Sarakoses wanted to hand over the school to a foundation as a gift that would serve as her merit in reincarnation, as is her devout Buddhist belief. The Good Child Foundation was set up take over and the school was granted foundation status. Paul Lennon was determined not to send his son away and in the Good Child Foundation he found a school willing to take Berni in exchange for Paul teaching English for free. When the school came to Paul looking for help with raising funds, Paul cut his own deal.
“Last year the founder of the school sat down with me and asked me could I raise some money for the foundation. The funding we get from the Thai government only covers teachers salaries and electricity, so he asked me could I think of a way to raise more money. So I went away and thought about it for a couple of days and came back to him with a deal. I said I’ll fund raise for you, if you give me a free hand to find any Down Syndrome children I can find and bring them to the school, this school will have to advertise everywhere that we’ll take Down Syndrome children, and, you have to let me teach them any songs I want to teach them as part of my English lessons. He told me to go ahead.” Having been brought up by a father from Castle Blaney, County Monaghan and a mother from Lisselton, County Kerry, Paul was steeped in traditional Irish music. He set about using popular Irish ballads to improve the English skills of the children in the school. Having also grown up a massive supporter of Glasgow Celtic Football Club he used well known Celtic related songs as well. This is when the word on the internet began to spread. Celtic supporters across the globe found and shared the videos Paul had uploaded to the web and a frenzied interest in the school told hold. It took little time for the Celtic fans to voice their backing and financially lend their support. Celtic FC have recently approached Paul with a view to adding the foundation to the Celtic Charity Fund.
Far from being a gimmick used to attract attention, Paul has employed music as a tool for the benefit of the children’s English. “The songs are fantastic, the songs are everything. I started on kiddies songs, there’s a thing called Potato Pals by an Irish guy called Patrick Jackson that’s an Oxford University teaching tool. I taught them to read and we moved on to the Irish songs because we needed to raise money, so I thought Irish songs and Celtic songs might help because it’s unusual and no one had ever done it before. I go through all the lyrics, play lots of vocabulary games and we don’t allow any Thai writing in the lyrics, so the children learn to read through the lyrics. They learn to read, they learn to spell and there’s a garage three miles away from the school where I drive the mini bus every afternoon with fifteen kids at a go and we spend ten minutes or so chatting with the tourists that are passing through on the way to Cambodia, so we get the conversation practice in as well. The songs gave them confidence, gave them pronunciation practice, spelling, grammar and the kids love it. Before, they were taught by other Thai teachers and everybody hated English. But because of the songs, the schools numbers are going up and soon our level of English will be as good as the fee paying schools where the children of doctors and lawyers go.” Paul says his fund raising plan was based on drawing the attention of the Irish and Celtic supporters. “Those were my main targets really. The Irish in North America, Irish around the world and Celtic supporters. I said to my wife that if I was in England and I heard about this charity, I would donate to it. I taught them The Town I Love So Well in English and in Thai cause I’ve been speaking Thai for twenty years now. I was hoping Phil Coulter would respond to us, but nothing ever came from it. I never go an e-mail back.”
The Chanthaburi province is known for it’s rubber plantations, and the majority of it’s inhabitants are farmers and construction workers. The understanding of Down Syndrome is poor in the area but Paul is desperate to raise the level of awareness and improve the quality of life for kids affected by Down Syndrome in Chanthaburi. The school can not afford any specialist teachers or help and with an average class of fifty being taught by one teacher, the school has developed a very unique way to school Down Syndrome children without any of the other children losing out. In fact the children have benefited greatly from this approach. “Thai people have the misconception that it’s incredibly hard to look after a Down Syndrome child, and it’s not. What I’ve been doing over the last four years, I’ve been observing through the window, when I get spare few minutes, how my son is getting on, because I teach there all the time. With a class of fifty the teacher has developed a technique were she teaches the four brightest children in the class exactly what Berni needs to learn. She explains it all, they get flash cards and they work on Berni. My son is not taught by the teacher, he’s essentially taught by his friends and the other kids have greatly benefitted from it as well. The teachers said the girls that teach him have really gained from this approach. The kids that are helping the down syndrome kids are doing better than most of the other kids in the school, I’ve never heard of it before, but we think children educating children is the way to go. Berni copies what everyone else does, he has his dinner at the same time and he’s well behaved, he won’t let me teach him now. The new Down Syndrome children we are taking in will be taught in the same way.”
It’s has become Paul’s mission to find as many down syndrome children as he can in the area. Last year the school welcomed the first child, aside from Berni, with Down Syndrome. Her life is now going to be completely different to what was planned for her before Paul found her. “ About six months ago we saved a little girl called Nuey. Her parents had filled in all the paper work to send her away to the mental Home in Rayong City, and we stopped that. We gave her a place in our school and she’s taught by the other children. When she first came she couldn’t sit down, and her behavior was quite bad, but after six months in the school she’s sitting down, coloring in, she’s singing the Irish songs. All with a group of friends around her to help.” Paul has now developed contacts at the local hospital that inform parents with a Down Syndrome child that the school will accept them. The children entering the school are between the age of 3 and 5. “ Sadly we can’t take Down Syndrome children that are around nine or ten. Because if they’ve never been to school I doubt we’d have the ability to adapt them to the school life. But if we get them between three and five, they can go through school with the same buddies and adapt that way.”
I couldn’t help but be amazed at how Paul referred to his welcoming a new child with Down Syndrome in to the school as having ‘saved’ them. The awareness of the condition in rural parts of Thailand is something that Paul has dedicated himself to. “I’m willing to give the rest of my working life to this. We’re very lucky in that we owned and ran a successful Thai restaurant in England when we lived there for eleven years. We now rent that out, so we receive a monthly wage from that and it gives us the freedom to do what we’re doing. We want to save as many children as we can and raise the awareness and understanding of this condition in Thailand. The Thai comedian Sai Yan is popular on television here and his condition is used as a joke in the show. When we take Berni to the market people tell me he looks like that character, but I believe it was like that in Britain years ago, it’s just a bit behind here. The little girl we saved recently, although she’s been going to our school for a few months now, she’s never been to the local market. It’s just home then school. Her parents don’t let her out of the car at the market. I told her father you can’t do this, you have to include her in everything now. Her father just said he’s so embarrassed. He told me he loves his daughter and when they are at home he plays and cuddles her, but if he went around with her in public people would question his manhood and he wouldn’t feel like a man. This is the thinking of the people here in the countryside.”
Paul appears to be up against something of a misinformed stigma attached to Down Syndrome in his work and the more he can do for the foundation, the more he will be able to start changing the thinking of the families he comes in to contact with. The fund raising so far has helped Paul set up two separate Celtic themed classrooms in the school that will have a large television, a dvd player and extra English learning aids. It will aid Paul in supporting people like Chris Joyce, a law graduate from Galway who is currently doing volunteer work for a year at the school on the strength of the YouTube videos. The money donated up to now has provided transport for some of the Down Syndrome children that live further away. Paul stated that the school does not need massive amounts of money to be maintained, but the extra assistance has made it easier for him to help Down Syndrome children in this and the surrounding areas.
Just before completing this piece, Paul contacted me to tell me about a young boy named Net that he had found and saved. Net lives 50km away from the school and the funds raised are helping transport him. Aside from Down Syndrome, Net suffers from a condition known as Anorectal Anomaly or Imperforate Anus, meaning he can only excrete through tubes in his side, he also has heart complications and requires weekly hospital visits. “Net has never played with any other children. His mother told me she was afraid other children would catch down syndrome from him, those are the words she used. I'll work on getting Net accepted by a local school in the future. I reckon if we offer a small monthly bonus and I teach an English summer camp every year for free, some school might accept him if we've had a couple of years teaching him first. The fund raising will help with this. We took Berni with us when we went to visit so they could play together. His mother is looking for work, so we’re going to give her a job as a cleaner in our school. It gives me an unbelievable feeling to think of these kids at home in bed with their parents instead of in a line of beds in a dormitory of lost children.”
Paul Lennon is not asking for the world, him and his story are an incredible example of how important it is to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Let the children sing.
http://www.goodchildfoundation.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR-y2F195e0
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