Bee

Bee’s shy smile is beautiful, and lights up the dim interior of the wood-frame room she rents in one of Bangkok’s slums. She is gracious, quick to offer the only cushion in the room to a guest. We sit on a patched and sagging lino floor above a smelly canal.

This is home for Bee, her two youngest children, and the man she calls husband, who neglected her as ‘minor wife’ for years before returning to her care. He is wasting away under a green mosquito net, weak and lethargic from diabetes or something worse. But this is family, this is home, and Bee is determined to do what she can to provide. Her mother gave her some rice last time she visited her other children in a small up-country city, and today some neighbors shared their morning-glory greens, pumpkin, and eggs. She carefully rations the sweetened condensed milk she waters down to put in her nearly-4-year-old daughter’s bottle.

All these things help, but Bee is most thankful for the work she has, and proudly points out the makeshift table – a small board resting on a bucket – where she creates her Hope Cards. When asked which one is her favorite to make, she says, “I like them all! I’d just like more!” At present, Hope Cards only has enough orders to give Bee about twenty cards to make per week. She loves her work so much that she usually finishes those twenty cards in one afternoon.

Her desire for her children is simple: a good education, so they won’t have to start working in the city at twelve years old, like she did. Hope Cards might seem like a drop in that bucket she overturns to craft the saa-paper cards, but the hope is so important, and it’s breaking through… “I want to change,” says Bee. “I want to give my life to this.”