On Nipa Island (a pseudonym), in a Thai Muslim community on the Andaman coast, childhood is a happy period as children are pampered and loved and spend long, happy hours in the company of their home- village friends. From these sustained social interactions develop long-lasting friendships that function importantly later on in adult life. Kloe-ship, another form of friendship is unique to Southern Thailand. Comparative human development, discourse analysis, kinesic analysis, and multiplexity of social networks form the theoretical approaches to the analysis of the ethnographic data.