Published on September 02, 2005

Peter Ungphakorn revisits a family he wrote about 17 years ago and meets a man with a creative approach to disability

You might think that it was the Bt200-Bt300 per month that has made all the difference. After all, Jaew would normally be described as mentally or intellectually handicapped, seriously enough to have little chance of employment.

Now she is proud that she “goes to work” like her parents, like any grown up. She has been transformed from a disheartened, inactive teenager into a motivated, happy young woman. And the relief this brings to her family is palpable.
“This is a god-send project,” says Jaew’s father, Chaiyan Rajchagool.

“Going to work” is only part of the story. Jaew is now part of a unique group of disabled people who are discovering how they can support each other, develop their creative skills and become a small community - thanks in large measure to a Japanese artist-turned-development worker, Haruo Nakayama.

The parents see the project as a model that can be developed around the country. But only three years after it was set up, it is approaching a turning point. Its present funding is coming to an end, and the families concerned now face the challenge of finding new ways to keep it going.

Jaew

Jaew (Muthita Rajchagool) has Down’s syndrome. Seventeen years ago, shortly after she was born, her parents described to The Nation how they came to terms with her condition and their search for the best way to care for her, between the many people who misunderstood and the few who were able to help.

Chaiyan and his wife Sunsanee were determined that an institution was not the answer. They were lucky to find sympathetic schools and teachers, first in Bangkok and later when they moved to Chiang Mai. So Jaew was able to attend normal schools even though she could not absorb difficult material.

At first this worked well; the young children accepted her even though she was a bit slower. But as the years passed and adolescence approached, the difference between Jaew and her classmates became more pronounced. They no longer played with her. Older, more experienced teachers retired and their replacements were less understanding, sometimes less caring. Jaew became so discouraged that she finally refused to go to school, resisting all efforts to persuade or force her.

Chaiyan and Sunsanee were desperate. In their search for a new solution for Jaew, they turned to Nakayama-San. By then the “Saori Creative Centre” was a year old, and Nakayama-San’s ideas were already evolving.

Nakayama-San was trained as an artist. He worked in Bangladesh for seven years on an income-generating programme for women funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), which is affiliated to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

The next 10 years were back in Japan with Saori-Hiroba. This is a non-profit-making organisation set up in Osaka in 1982 and registered in Thailand since 1999, focusing on weaving, including for the disabled.

Saori-Hiroba then asked him to move to Thailand, where he set up the Saori Creative Centre in Chiang Mai. Here, the Saori approach and his own artistic outlook have been the launch pad for the creation of a small community, rejecting top-down approaches that mould people to preconceived objectives. Particularly novel is Saori’s bottom-up approach (starting from the people themselves) to disability.

The bicycle approach

Jaew started at the Saori Creative Centre in February 2004 and since then the family has never looked back. She is one of the fastest weavers, her earnings depending on how much she wants to weave each day. Nakayama-San does not tell her or her colleagues how much work they should do. It is entirely up to them.

And now, even when she is in front of the TV at home, she is less of a passive viewer watching cartoons. You have to learn to recognise the sound, but more often than not she is singing along to karaoke.

The stimulation that Jaew and her companions receive from the centre and from each other is the result of what Nakayama-San calls “free thinking”. They are taught how to weave, but not what to weave, or when.

“I only show them how to ride the bicycle. They choose where to go,” says Nakayama-San.

Teaching them “how to ride the bicycle” includes taking them on trips and encouraging them to use their imagination. So the patterns of the colourful fabrics they weave reflect the mountains, the trees, the skies and the buildings they have seen. One young man, Ae (Sompong Choedhiran), longs so much for his first glimpse of the sea that he has woven a cloth with fish motifs.

If the weaving is sometimes uneven, so much the better. Traditional Japanese art values the uniqueness of irregular shapes, for example the highly prized wabi sabi pottery based on the Zen view that all things are impermanent, imperfect and incomplete.

Nakayama-San contrasts this with modern Japanese education, which demands that students meet preconceived objectives, or conventional Japanese teachers of weaving who might say that the Saori cloth is substandard and untidy.
Individual dignity

But standards are not part of Saori thinking. “Sa” is based on a Zen word, sai, which means everything has its own individual dignity, just as beautiful flowers are never identical. “Ori” means weaving.
Nakayama-San has introduced the Saori concept in Chiang Mai. He deliberately rented a house in the middle of a housing estate despite warnings that bringing disabled people in might upset the neighbours. He made the centre as ordinary and familiar as possible and organised activities such as inviting monks to the house. There have been no complaints.

And just as the cloths should not be the same, so the people who make the cloths should also be diverse. He picked members with a range of disabilities and of different severity: Down’s syndrome, autism, hyperactivity, and various physical and emotional problems.

The result is a varied community who understand and tolerate each other’s disabilities, and who stimulate and support each other. Their lives can be frustrating, but so far the blend seems to work.

Take for example the recent Mothers’ Day celebration. A highlight was a dance routine, choreographed to Bird MacIntyre’s “Oh-la-nor” by Ting-li (Prachya Som-bat). Ting-li clearly has some talent. For many of the rest, a foot landing on the correct beat would probably be coincidence. Where the troupe were completely in step was their shared enjoyment and the encouragement they gave each other. That seems to be typical of their approach to each other in general. And whereas someone like Jaew can hardly read or write, Anna (Karuna Wichitporn) recited a poem that she wrote and dedicated to her mother.

As for Jaew herself, she sometimes plays a surprising role. Her calmness and her endearing smile have encouraged at least one young woman to unburden her emotional problems to her. Jaew might not understand, but like any good psychiatrist, she can listen.

Disabled?

Nakayama-San dislikes the word “disabled”, but sometimes it is unavoidable. There are many types of disability, he says: “If you go to Japan, you are disabled because you cannot speak Japanese.” That’s why he prefers to call Jaew and her friends “artists”.

Employment and comradeship have given them self-esteem. The weaving itself provides focus, calming their sometimes turbulent emotions. But weaving is not essential. Any activity would do, such as a bakery or a computer print shop.

The Rajchagool parents are now convinced that this is the only approach. They dislike big institutions where parents often leave their disabled children and drift away from them. But Nakayama-San cautions that a lot of explaining is needed if other centres are to work. “First the parents have to understand.”

He has been an immense influence on the Chiang Mai centre, not only in the way he set it up, but by devising ways to make the fabrics marketable. The parents now have to make the centre more self-reliant. JICA’s financial support is coming to an end. In October, the centre will come under the new Healing Family Foundation. Nakayama-San will stay for a while, but eventually he will return to his family in Japan.

The future of Jaew and her friends is in the balance, but their families and their Japanese mentor are determined to make it a success.

Note: The Saori centre’s fabrics are on display till Sunday at the National Herbal Products fair at Impact Muang Thong Thani,

Halls 1 and 2.
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