254 Soakhamnuan hard, always helped the community, and he told them that he didn’t want to see me drop out of school and go work like my sisters. I actually asked them if they were only going to support Thai people so that I didn’t have false hope. They said that no, they would support stateless people too. My heart beat so fast when they told me that. Every night I prayed that they would choose me. I found out about a month before school started that DEPDC chose me. They called my mother and told her that they would support me and send me to school. My mother didn’t tell me at first. My mother talked to my oldest sister first. They argued for a long time, then my sister told me. She just thought it was a good opportunity for me. I was really excited when I found out – I was running around and telling my friends that I was going to school. I lived at DEPDC and studied at a government school from seventh grade to ninth grade. All of the teachers loved me and I was a leader in my classroom. I had a lot of friends that understood me. When I thought back to when I was with my family, I missed my home and wanted to be with them, but at home I was not allowed to go outside and play; I had to help my mom with work. At DEPDC, I was able to play outside with friends. I knew I was lucky; only two of the seven students who applied to DEPDC got in. 7 ‘High School’ DEPDC only had the money to support me until ninth grade. When I finished ninth grade, I started studying with the Mekong Youth Network (MYN), a program of DEPDC. Through MYN, I learned about human trafficking, child labor, child prostitution, drugs and other problems around the world. I studied with MYN for one year. The next year, I worked for DEPDC full-time and got paid. That’s how I paid for high school. One semester of school was only 300 baht and I had to pay about 300 baht more for books. All of the money that I earned from DEPDC went to pay for school. The school I attended was a high school for people who didn’t have the time or money to go to a regular school or who were stateless. Classes were only on Saturday and Sunday for 2 hours and it took only two years to complete tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades. I studied the same subjects as Thai students, but it was more independent; I did a lot of homework and reading by myself in my room at DEPDC. Although I always knew that I was not ready to drop out of school, get married and go to work, I didn’t really have a dream of what I wanted to do. I was told that because I was stateless, I couldn’t do whatever I wanted to do. If I said I wanted to be a teacher, everyone would say, ‘You’re stateless, you can’t have a tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260