She has a makeshift hand-painted sign – “Clothes washed” – hanging at the dusty entrance lane to her small house opposite the Ban Suan Place apartments, directly across from the Family Mart shop.
With the back entrance of Big C just up the road and the Phuket International Hospital the other way, that little sign brings her enough laundry work each day.
The day starts early. Her three-year-old son Jikto needs to be taken to nearby kindergarten on the motorbike. Then the daily pile of clothes and bed sheets that have been left for washing and ironing awaits.
Her regular customers simply stroll in on their way to work and leave shirts, trousers and skirts on the boot of the dusty car that sits unused by the side of her shack.
Her little kitchen/laundry is crammed with three washing machines that rumble into work early. The production-line of washed clothes is then hung out to dry on the many lines in the little compound she shares with other families living in modest shacks.
There is usually ironing to be done straight away, her only break being at lunch, while the day’s washing is drying. Then the long hot afternoon is spent ironing in her living room where a big TV blares out one soap opera after another.
Her pretty young daughter Jaja, 2, keeps her company, playing on the living room floor.
Mrs Suparat charges B10-15 for each item of clothing washed, ironed, folded and wrapped in plastic to be collected the same day. Her sister rents the store space that faces the busy street in front of the shack, where she cook noodles and rice for hungry passers-by.
She came to Phuket from Surin Province in the northeast of Thailand some five years ago to work in a restaurant in the MK chain, then for 7-Eleven.
Mrs Suparat says the small income keeps the family going. But she misses the salary she got when she was managing a 7-Eleven store, before the children were born.
Her husband Sak works as an occasional labourer at building sites and also helps out on fishing boats.
“We didn’t use contraceptives, so I became pregnant,” she says with her usual easy smile. “When the children came, we had to make the best of it. But they are lovely children.”
The children under discussion pause to look, their eyes wide, then laugh and trot off to play with their cousin Jeu, who lives close by.
A long day is coming to an end but the cheerful and energetic laundrywoman is still ironing. The pile of work to be done tomorrow grows again on the bench at the corner of the cramped laundry. Just as well.
If you want your laundry done and your shirts and trousers neatly ironed, and you want to help this humble family make ends meet, just walk down the dirt entrance to her laundry on the right, at the back of her sister’s food stall.
Suparat will cheerfully tend to your clothes.
– Norachai Thavisin