The Best 26 Years of Our Lives

August 18th, 2000 … a date forever etched on our minds … the day we flew from London Heathrow with our three young children for an adventure into the unknown. Bangkok Patana awaited us in the ‘Land of Smiles’ and little did we know that it would become like a family for more than the next quarter of a century. Thailand, and Bangkok, have grown to become incredibly important to us and we now count ourselves lucky to call two places on the planet home.

Some of our favourite memories (and there are so many) relate to watching our boys grow and develop into the young men they are today, experiencing everything that Patana had and has to offer … from their wonderfully well-rounded education to the opportunities they discovered on the sports fields of SE Asia where they flourished, to the stages of the old auditorium (now the Secondary Library), the new Theatre and the Black Box where they were encouraged to showcase a side to their characters that had hitherto been very well hidden!

It has been a privilege to play a small part in the learning journeys and lives of hundreds of children and students at Patana. Being able to see many of them graduate from the school and to watch them walk across the stage to collect their Patana Diplomas has been a joy to behold.

Along with our own development, as teachers and individuals, our boys, their friends and the children we have taught have become both open minded and are caring, empathetic, hardworking, kind and helpful … just the type of people you want taking their first adult steps in the world. Patana alumni make a real difference!

Saying goodbye to this special school, and the city we call home, is going to be the hardest thing we have done. As someone recently told us, “Don’t be sad that it is over, be happy that it happened,” and that encapsulates everything for us – in August 2000 we could never have imagined that the dream we had, moving to Patana, was going to turn out to be the best 26 years of our lives.