“A superintendent of mission schools appointed; and myself appointed to that office. Shall have new responsibilities and important ones; would shrink, but dare not, cannot—must go forward. Perhaps will find what I have been waiting for yet. Talked over openings for starting schools. We all feel as if we are but just organized—as it were, commencing.”
This appointment was after the doctor had fully abandoned medical practise. The new school started off with good prospects. In October Mrs. Mattoon began to give instruction in Siamese language to the eight boys. The annual report to the Board, prepared perhaps two months later, gives the enrollment at twenty-seven, including the four girls in the families and day pupils; while in January the doctor comments:
“Our schools are doing well, but too few pupils. Geography and arithmetic in the boarding school (twelve pupils) now fall to me.”
The use of the word “schools” in the plural is accounted for by the fact that Mrs. Mattoon had succeeded about this time in organising a class in the Peguan village, across the river. But the period of daily instruction was manifestly not enough to counteract the influence of the community. Having through a number of months succeeded in winning the confidence of the parents, at length, in February, 1853, she induced them to let their children (mostly girls) go to live in the mission compound:
“February 9. Tomorrow we expect to have quite an accession to the number of our boarding pupils—the whole (almost) of the scholars at the Peguan village, where Mrs. Mattoon has won the confidence of the parents as well as the love of the children. Teacher Kieng reports that their mothers were washing and scrubbing them as clean as possible today, and their teeth have all got quite white, so long have they left off chewing betel.
“February 10. And they have indeed come, the little ones whom Mrs. Mattoon has allured from their mothers, to take up their home with us. They hardly slept last night their mothers said and were up early—and yet some tears were shed.... The mothers came with them; showed them our school rooms, the new bamboo bedsteads, the maps—China, Burmah, Ceylon, England, America. Speaking of my mother—‘Is she yet alive?’ said one of them, ‘now why did you leave your mother and come to live in Siam.’... Ploi is engaged by Mrs. Mattoon to prepare their food and to go to bathe with them.”
Thus began the first boarding school for girls at the Presbyterian Mission in Siam.
DIFFICULTY IN OBTAINING PUPILS
One of the difficulties encountered was to secure pupils for a period sufficiently long to make the work worth while. So little did the Siamese parents value the opportunities offered that they even wanted to be paid to send their children. A custom of the country afforded a practical means to obtain and hold pupils for a period of years.