How to Frame Your Face and Other Instruction in Silliness

 

There's this thing our Thai kids do when they know you're taking their picture.

It consists of various finger poses at various angles around one's face.  This is something I've seen everywhere in Northern Thailand since I started going in 2008.  It's fun, it's quirky, and apparently it makes you look super cool.

Of course, when you're getting your picture taken in a more formal setting, for a group shot at school, or if you're in your school uniform, or any time you need a more sensible rendering of your person, then things can be all straight-laced and tidy.  No face framing happens then.

But if you're just kabbitzing around before or after evening worship, if somebody randomly points a camera at you and asks you to "yim" (smile), then no end of posing ensues.

And I love it.  I love that the children are free and comfortable and feel safe enough to be silly.  Safe enough with us as the "farangs" (foreigners).  Safe enough within our family.

I think before my exposure to the darker side of things for so many children in Thailand, and also other places around the world, I would have taken something as, well, silly as being silly for granted. 

Children play.  Children are carefree.  Children make faces and ham it up for the camera, or just do no end of antics just to be entertaining.  That's what children do.  Right?

Not all of them.  Some kids are too hungry, too lethargic, too anxious, too terrified to engage in the silly stuff.  And some of our kids, when they first get here, don't know how to frame their face for a photo.  They don't know how to have fun.  Life has been way to serious for them up until now.

Right now at Hot Springs there's an extra dose of silly fun, I think.  Perhaps because we have once again found ourselves with more younger children than older.  The age-wave changes as each group grows.  But for right now, lots of making faces, lots of big singing, lots of happy dancing and hilarity and joy.

Sometimes it occurs to me.

Every sad and awful thing that has ever happened in my life

is superseded,

and maybe even now makes sense

or at the very least just doesn't matter any more,

because of this.