You’ve probably seen her about town, riding her bike and
delivering little packages to the local bakeries. You’ve
probably even tasted her Molly Maid jams, those delicious
little jars of mango or passion fruit or roselle. But if you
think she’s just a sweet lady with a talent for cooking, think
again. Molly Phua-Ngam-Prasert is indeed a sweet lady, but she
has a story that is much more complex, much more interesting to
tell. An hour with Molly was not enough, and here’s why.
Molly
was born in the southwest midlands of England, a fruit growing
area. Her father was a cherry grower, but that still doesn’t
explain the jams. When his children went off to boarding school
during World War II, he would cover the fruit-laden cherry tree
branches with sacks to preserve the fresh cherries for them.
It’s a fond childhood memory.
By the time the war was over, Molly knew just
what she wanted to do with her life. She studied occupational
therapy at Oxford, and then worked in a psychiatric hospital for
six and a half years. Like many people who are exposed to the
tragedy of mental illness and the destruction it wreaks on
families, she had a lot of questions. Those questions continued
to plague her and she eventually decided to go to theological
college in search of answers. As she remembers, she “wanted
the answer to some big questions”. She found many of them,
enough to decide that there was a world to be helped and people
and places to discover.
She took an intensive summer course at the
Institute of Linguistics, and was certified as a linguist. Then
she joined the China Inland Mission and went abroad to
Singapore. The mission was both international and
interdenominational, and she says aside “denominations are
irrelevant”. As an occupational therapist, she was interested
in working with lepers, although she had never met anybody with
Hansen’s disease. She believed that she could help them
develop skills that were marketable. She understood how
disenfranchised the disabled were after working with people who
had mental illnesses. She understood the stigma. The mission
sent her to Singapore for orientation, and then to Thailand to a
small Christian hospital in Chainat Province to work on the
leprosy team.
She was there for ten years, working her
dream. She started a vocational training school that taught
carpentry, shoemaking, toy making and embroidery, all marketable
skills. The shoemaking department specialized in making
orthopedic shoes for patients and former patients who had lost
parts of their feet to leprosy. Many of the trainees worked at
home. The women were able to hire someone to harvest their rice
while they embroidered, creating two jobs where there had been
none. Molly also taught adult literacy, and she is especially
proud of all the children she taught to read Thai. A very fine
USA educated woman laboratory technician taught her laboratory
skills, and she became a lab tech in addition to an occupational
therapist. She says that she “never worked so hard in my
life”.
She met Teng, who was in the first group of
trainees in the shoe department. She was impressed with his
intelligence and eagerness to learn and help. He had been a
self-taught village doctor before he became ill with Hansen’s
disease himself, but quickly learned to make shoes. He became
department head of the orthopedic shoe department. The two of
them taught hand and foot care for people with leprosy who had
“anesthetic feet”. Teng, who had converted to Christianity,
preached in little country churches in the area. They married,
and moved to Chiang Mai to work at McKean Leprosarium. Although
the person who asked Teng to come to Chiang Mai left before they
even arrived, they stayed here and worked. They again focused on
teaching hand and foot care, and Molly taught craftwork to
severely disabled people who had leprosy. Learning marketable
skills, she says, helped some of her patients to become
independent for the first time in their lives. One man who had
almost no digits remaining on his hands learned to make wooden
puzzles. Molly tried to teach him how to change the blades in
the jigsaw, but her way was not his way. So she discreetly left
the room, and “left him to find his own way”. He succeeded.
After six years at McKean, Molly moved to AUA
where she taught English for the next twenty years. The director
of AUA suggested that she and a colleague form a team and teach
a TOEFL preparatory course. Despite her protests that an English
woman may not be a good choice to teach an American preparatory
course, they enjoyed great success. Molly retired from AUA when
she was 72, but continues to take private students.
Along the way Molly and Teng became foster
parents to a little six-year-old girl whose mother had died.
Like many families, the course of that relationship has been
complicated, but they loved her and her husband and child, and
later her husband’s second wife and children. That would
become important to Molly Maid jams.
About eight years ago, Molly began making
jams for her family and friends. At a friend’s urging, she
began to sell the little jars at the international school’s
sala sales. Now she and her “widowed daughter in law” make
jam together. The product depends on the season - passion fruit,
orange and lime marmalade, mango, tamarind, strawberry, and
Roselle jams with their label. They only work on Saturday, and
produce about 25 pounds of jam a week. Other days she teaches
English. She loves to talk about her students. She thrives on
their accomplishments.
Molly is a very active, young 76 year old. I
ask her if she has plans to retire. “Retire?”, she says,
“what would I do?” We both laugh. Does she think about going
home to England? “I am home”, she tells me, “I only miss
the British Guardian Weekly”. Can somebody help with that?
