A Personal Story About Statelessness 255 dream. You don’t know if you can even go to school or get a higher education.’ I never told myself ‘I want to be this, or, I hope I can be that’ I just wanted to go to school and learn what was out there, what people liked to do. That was one of the things that hurt me the most growing-up, when people told me that I could not do something because I was stateless. Only two other stateless people from my village that were my age graduated from high school. No one thinks that they can be stateless and have a good life in Thailand; everyone who is stateless knows that Thai citizenship will help them. After I graduated from high school in 2008, I still didn’t have citizenship and I still didn’t have options. 8 The Thailand Project I was 19 when I found out about The Thailand Project (TTP), a non-profit based in the United States that helps stateless people in Thailand. The director of DEPDC told me that TTP would give me a scholarship to study at a university in the United States. I was excited. It was the greatest feeling ever, but at the same time, I was thinking, ‘How can I go? I don’t have citizenship. How will it work for me to go to another country?’ Even with my pink I.D., if I just wanted to go to a different city in Thailand, I couldn’t go without permission from the government and, even then, they only gave stateless people permission to travel for a maximum of 10 days. When Joseph Quinnell and Susan Perri, Co-Founders and Co-Directors of TTP, came to Thailand, I remember that we worked really hard. We tried to get paperwork from wherever we could to prove that I grew up in Thailand so that I could get a travel document from the Thai government to study in the United States. Mostly, we collected all of my schoolwork and school papers. After I gathered all of my paperwork, I had one last meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Interior and Thai Immigration in Bangkok. After our meeting, they didn’t say anything for a week. Then, they e-mailed and said that they would send me a travel document. It was a yellow book for Aliens that allowed me to go to the U.S. for one year and re-enter Thailand. They gave me a travel document for aliens because they didn’t have any documents that allowed stateless people to travel. I was the first stateless person in Thailand to get an Alien Travel Document and permission to travel outside of the country for that length of time and return. Every year that I wanted to continue to study, I would have to return to Thailand to renew the document. I think that I felt that it was a dream. I couldn’t believe it. I told my family everyday that I couldn’t believe it. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260