Chantira’s story Part 1

Chantira is one of 11 children, eight of whom survive. Her father died when she was two. When she was a small child her mother did not have enough money to buy her clothes and worked all day with the other children in the fields so she used to leave Chantira with no clothes on and her leg tied to a post so she couldn’t wander off. There was a small bowl of water in case she got thirsty. Later, her elder sister occasionally took her to school with her, where she would sit in the class without understanding what was going on. When she was 11 her mother sent her to a well-to-do Lahu family to work. She lived there, got up at 3.30 am each morning to fetch heavy containers of water from the well and worked without a break until late at night. She cried so much that eventually her mother allowed her to come home and help in the fields or selling pathetic little clutches of herbs or fruits from the forest in the market. This lasted until her early twenties, apart from an interlude of two years when her mother sent her to school; she proved a studious child.

Advertisement