The first time Somchit Wongketjai was nearly blown to pieces happened three years ago. She was returning home after a full day’s teaching at Ban Bue Jo Primary School, riding her motorbike, just as she had done every school day for the past 37 years.
On that afternoon, however, insurgents had laid a deadly trap.
Ban Bue Jo is in a red zone; an area where bombs and bullets and beheadings are commonplace in the ongoing terrorism that afflicts the deep South. On that day whoever was hiding in the bushes nearby decided this elderly schoolmistress would be a perfect target. As she drove past they detonated a bomb.
It was fortuitous that the insurgents’ evil intentions were only superseded by their ineptitude; the bomb went off a few vital seconds too early. It did succeed in knocking her off her bike, but she sustained no more than minor physical injuries.
“It certainly gave me a nasty shock,” Ajarn Somchit said. “I’d never been so shaken up before. After that, soldiers were ordered to escort us [teachers] to and from the school.”
Her superior offered his condolences and asked if she would like to move out of the area. Who wouldn’t? I certainly wouldn’t be hanging around a rural area populated by insurgents wanting to blow me up from behind trees. Ajarn Somchit, it is clear, is a stronger person than me.
“I said no,” she said. “I was worried about my students. If I were to transfer, who would teach them?”
One immediately wonders exactly why southern terrorists would find an elderly prim and proper primary school teacher such an enemy of their cause that she needed to be obliterated.
And yet that is the reality for teachers in Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat. They are primary targets of meatheads who kill, maim and disfigure in the name of religion and segregation. That, and the fact it is easier to control and intimidate a mass of idiots then one that has an education.
Survivor: Teacher Somchit Wongketjai, left, waits at a hospital for treatment on a leg injury after a bomb went off, right.
Ajarn Somchit was born and bred in Narathiwat. Her Buddhist family lived in a predominantly Muslim society, but that wasn’t a problem back in the 1960s when she was a child, dreaming of a future as a teacher.
At the age of 20 her dream was realised and she began teaching at Ban Bue Jo School, 10 kilometres from Narathiwat Airport and a little more than 100 kilometres from the Malaysian border. It is a rural community of farmers and rubber plantation workers.
“Back then we all lived side by side like brothers and sisters,” she said. “We looked out for one another. The fact someone was Buddhist or Muslim wasn’t an issue. We were a community. But that all changed in 2004.”
She is talking about January 4, 2004, considered the dawn of the dark era. On that day a Thai Army ammunition depot in Narathiwat was raided by armed militants and 400 guns were stolen.
Later in the year, a truly horrific incident — nearly 80 Muslim male demonstrators were killed after being herded into the back of military trucks, after they protested against the detention of men suspected of giving weapons to Islamic separatists. The men were literally stacked on top of one another like meat carcases and soon suffocated. After that the battle lines were drawn.
But back to Ajarn Somchit.
Despite pleas to the contrary, she stayed in her position. “I had a duty to my Year 4, 5 and 6 students,” she stressed. “How could I leave them? And besides, I just figured the situation in the South would get better.”
We now must jump forward a year, to 2013, and Ajarn Somchit no longer was riding a motorbike to school. Now she had a military escort.
One day she and some friends drove in a pickup truck to visit friends who had been injured in a bomb blast. They were recovering in a ward in a Hat Yai hospital.
On the way home in Yaring, a district in Pattani 50km from Ajarn Somchit’s home, a bomb exploded in the middle of the Asia Highway.
The soldier driving Ajarn Somchit’s pickup truck was killed instantly. Three others in the car were badly injured and rushed to hospital and this time Ajarn Somchit was not so lucky. She was one of the three.
Shrapnel narrowly missed her eyes but did severe damage to her nose and forehead. For 10 days she recuperated in hospital.
As her school director pointed out, Ajarn Somchit had narrowly escaped death. It was suggested again that she might like to move schools.
She refused.
“Well, I was concerned about my pupils,” she said. “I also pointed out that the bomb did not go off anywhere near my school. It was in another province, and we just happened to be driving on that road when it exploded.”
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I have trouble finding the proper words to do justice to a woman who looks terrorists in the eye and remains in a region where teachers are primary targets. Her students lined up and some burst into tears on the first day she returned to teaching after her second attack.
It is even more telling when we discover all 125 pupils at Ban Bue Jo are Muslim. “When somebody gets injured, children don’t ask what religion the injured party is,” she said.
These are words straight from the horse’s mouth. I spoke to Ajarn Somchit last Wednesday night. She is softly spoken for a primary school teacher, and her voice has more than a twinge of Southern dialect.
“I think we need to find work for the young people to do,” she says, when asked about possible solutions to the southern problem. “Youth here lack opportunity. They lack the chance to make a living. Thus they can easily be led astray. And recently drugs have infiltrated our community. That cannot be good.”
Ajarn Somchit wants to say more, but a doctor says she must rest her mouth, since she has an open wound on it as we speak.
You see just last Monday, January 19, the terrorists finally came to her school.
Driving in a pickup truck on her regular route to school in the morning, she was targeted by southern terrorists for the third time.
Insurgents placed a bomb under the concrete road metres from the school entrance. The force of the bomb ripped open the road and sent shrapnel into her once again, sustaining facial injuries, mangling her leg and splintering bones.
As you read this, Ajarn Somchit is recuperating in Narathiwat Ratchanakarin Hospital. Doctors are concerned about her injuries, particularly around her nose, eyes and mouth, and want her to make a full recovery before she can go back home.
It begs the question; how much can a 59-year-old bear?
Surely … surely three times is enough.
Her supervisor has already been to see her. Ajarn Somchit is due to retire in September this year, when she will turn 60. The supervisor has suggested a safe post away from the school.
Now will you think of leaving?
“My heart still worries about my pupils,” Ajarn Somchit told me in a soft, almost apologetic voice. “There is still so much to teach them. How can I leave them now?” n
