No Good Samaritan

This isn’t pretty. I’m not sure there is a happy ending.

Perhaps the picture will speak for itself.

Banteay Srei, a temple ruin outside of Angkor Wat.

When Andrea and I had visited three years earlier that’s all it was, a ruin out in the country side. We were there alone. Now a massive entry complex and parking lot have been developed and on the day we were there, thousands of others were with us, streaming in with their cameras to capture one more historical ruin.

And there on the ground at the entrance that everyone had to walk through…
What is that?” I heard someone ask.

I didn’t have an answer.

I couldn’t tell if the human that lay there was male or female. I couldn’t tell his or her age. I didn’t know how the burns and scars that so disfigured the face got there. I didn’t know if a parent had dropped this child off to beg at the entrance of the temple. And why just lying there, head into the concrete, eyes listless and unmoving? And why was no one doing…anything?

I didn’t have an answer. My eyes welled up with tears and I...like everyone else walked on.

God, have mercy...

On me, on us, on your creation that lay there all day.

My answer to the question soon came.

That…was the man lying in the ditch and we were the priests and levites and good upstanding people that walked by on the other side of the road.

And No Good Samaritan came.

That...is me…that is all of us…at the core, helpless, battered, bruised and bleeding.

And who will be our Good Samaritan?

And That…crippled, burned and disfigured, abandoned and left alone, the one from whom everyone averted their eyes and walked by…That was the image of God and perhaps, even Jesus.

God, have mercy.

Luke 10:25-37 (Two powerful reflections on this text can be found here and here.)

Duncan

What causes more offense? (Part 4 of Meat, Dogs and Skin)

Question. Which of these photos disturbs you more?

(Ok, this first one is just of clueless tourists who think they can roll out of bed and wear boxers around town...and specifically in the mall. I can deal, but really, could they not manage to dress up a little more?)

It's the next three that I really want to know about...

Hungry dog on the street...

Hungry homeless person sleeping on the street...

"Hungry" women for sale on the street...

These are the images and the realities of the Bangkok streets that I often cannot get out of my mind. Your thoughts?

Duncan

Week One – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly - but mainly just the good!

After leaving North Carolina and a packed ten days with family and friends in Seattle we have had our first week in Bangkok. At 7AM it’s a cool 78 degrees (25C) and a gentle breeze is blowing in the doors to our little balcony off our room. In a couple months the temperature will be closer to 100 so we are grateful for the cool morning air now. We have much to be grateful for and so this post will focus more on the good that we have experienced in the past days. (photo below taken on the campus of Chulalongkorn University.)

The Good

It’s so good to be back in Thailand. In some ways it doesn’t seem that long since we left Thailand two and a half years ago – although in between we drove across the country from Washington to North Carolina, settled into Durham, found employment and some fabulous friends and coworkers, Andrea has almost completed a dual MBA and MPP and lived in Geneva and Boston completing two internships – but it IS evident in how rusty my Thai is! But it was so good to walk off the plane and smell…Thailand, the warmth and humidity, the ever lurking fragrance of flowers in the night air. In the midst of the chaos and commercialization of Bangkok and the sometimes confusing and frustrating cultural differences that allow for abuse and use of people – especially women - there is a calmness and contentedness that rises up in me when I am here. Some of this is due to adjusted expectations knowing that life operates just a little differently here, some of it is just loving this country that continues to be home for me in many ways. And the joy (or more relaxed state) I feel is also a direct reflection of not working a full time job, plus a part time job and volunteering multiple hours in a week, while also helping Andrea persevere through a demanding academic load. Life is great at the moment (;-) I have time to think, pray, ponder. Although Bangkok hums at a pretty frantic pace 24 hours a day (just like any other city of 10 million plus) in some ways our life is slower here as it can take longer to accomplish certain things and also because we choose to live a little slower.

Anyway…we’re grateful to be here, grateful that my work has allowed me to take a leave of absence until April, grateful for time with family and friends in Seattle, grateful for smooth flights and great accommodations for the first 5 weeks that we are here.

We are staying at Sasa International House, a small hotel that is often used for visiting students and professors at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand’s oldest and highest ranked university (photo on the right taken from Wikipedia) where Andrea will be studying at SASIN, Chula’s Business school. For those of you who know Bangkok, we are living right on the edge of Chula’s campus, five minutes walk from MBK and the National Stadium BTS stop. Chula’s campus is expansive and stately with large lush trees. From our fourth floor window we look out on trees and some fun scampering squirrels. The birds wake us early in the morning and we can look down into some ponds where there lurk some massive koi and another 2 ½ foot fish that looks like a cross between an albino catfish and a hammerhead shark. We haven’t seen him clearly as the water is a little murky. Being on campus we have found a campus cafeteria that serves all manner of yummy thai food and drinks for even cheaper than you normally find it on the street. We’ve been able to figure out where to get things, where the real people live (as opposed to tourists and those with tons of money), set up internet and find a laundry – because hand washing clothes for two months would be a bummer but so would paying what the hotel wants to charge!

And I get to swim every day and enjoy my beloved rice cakes for breakfast! When we were here last time I posted a list of my favorite things in Bangkok. You can read them here, here and here.

The Bad

Really not much to report for us personally but you could count a little 'Bangkok Belly' which is par for the course at times. And then there was the moment that we were setting out to explore the campus and a tiny, almost invisible gnat didn’t just fly into my eye as we have all experienced at times but somehow this one stung my eyeball, unloading what felt like a nuclear bomb in my eye. I'm very thankful that it quickly subsided.

The Ugly…and ongoing questions

If you have read previous posts from our time here you know of some of the darker things that haunt us here. One day last week we walked up to MBK (advertised as the most visited mall in Bangkok), across the street and through several more huge, exclusive malls, (Siam Paragon – the 2nd largest mall in SE Asia, Central World etc) taking advantage of their air conditioning to get to a store we were going. It’s hard to describe sometimes the magnitude of these mammon/money worship centers of commercialization – hundreds and hundreds of boutiques, luxurious brands, dining experiences – one of the malls contains the biggest aquarium in Asia (in its basement!) - to me, it’s just a little overwhelming and maddening and then you step outside as we did and were confronted on an overpass bridge with a woman and her child begging, another woman with horribly disfigured hands holding them out for a few baht. After walking through the wealth represented in the malls which are still playing “God rest ye merry gentlemen” and then to encounter those so on the margins of society who will make less in a year than what one person might spend on a handbag…it almost undid me. I wrote about this before in Tell me what to do??? and am still wrestling with some of the same questions. It’s hard not to. (photo on the right - graffiti on a bridge in Bangkok.)

I have more questions which I’ll post in the future – but this is enough for now! Thanks for wandering with us, for your support and prayers for health, protection and good connections with people. We don’t take them for granted!

Duncan
PS. Another great post that Andrea wrote on our last trip describing Bankok can be found here.

Tell me what to do???

"I saw their temples and I lived in their cities
And I could not believe what took place all around me
I walked the streets and I rode their trains
And everywhere I went I could not escape the pain"

My old pal Sheila Walsh has an old song called Dorai Sani which starts out with the lyrics above. In many ways it is our experience as well. Really, no matter where we are in the world, if our eyes are open, this should be our reality. But this sentiment is very acute for us as we go about our daily lives even if we take away all the sex trade/human trafficking issues that are so overwhelming. Poverty shows itself in many forms. The least, last and lost are all around us. Most days when we walk to buy our lunch we cross an elevated pedestrian bridge across the busy road we live on. There are often three or four older people (seniors) who sit and beg there. One man disfigured and scarred by leprosy raises his tin cup to us as we walk by, his eyes drooping like a sad but hopeful beagle. Another woman has her leg amputated at the knee. She has an artificial leg but it is hard not to be moved by someone with a stained sock on her stump. I see her and often think of how my late Aunt Mary would have survived in this situation after she fell and could no longer walk. There is another man who isn’t scarred physically but his mind bears deep wounds. He appears comical at times but his jitteriness and awkwardness betray something deeper.

I don’t give money to people anywhere. There are too many people working a scam, too many having to work for someone who doesn’t treat them well. Many kids are trucked in by pimps to beg. So money for me isn’t an option. I will buy them food and I have for each of these three. There’s nothing heroic about it. It costs me less than a dollar. But it assuages my heart that wants to do something but doesn’t know what. I’m not the only one that buys them food. Other Thai do and many Thai drop coins into their cups they hold.

But is that it? Should I buy them something every time? Now can I walk on with a somewhat clearer conscience? I don’t know.

Tell me what to do???

And while you are at it, tell me what to do with the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of women who are prostituted in this city?

And maybe you can tell me how best to love the men both tourist and local who buy their services. I love the Chesterton quote – “Every man who enters a brothel is looking for God.” It rings true. I’ve sometimes joked that I want to start some sort of outreach to the customers here – I would call it “Anonymous Johns” Catchy huh? Actually one of the YWAM missionaries here has started an outreach to Male Sex Tourists here in Bangkok – ironically named…MST. It is done quite well and they have a good response. But this is just targeted at the foreign sex tourists, who, though they receive all the press, make up only a small percentage (10-20%) of the customers here in this country.
Tell me what to do in a culture and country where it is expected and accepted that many men will have multiple mistresses and where the sex trade related income makes up such a staggering amount of Thailand’s operating budget. While no one can put an exact number on it, we have heard that up to 60% of Thailand's budget comes from this.

Tell me what to do with this?

One of my favorite things to do in the morning before we have our Thai lessons is to go up to the top of our building by the pool to pray and ponder and then take a quick swim. There have been several mornings where visibility had to have been less than a mile due to the smog and pollution. It’s not great for the lungs but makes for some fabulous sunrises and sunsets. One day it was particularly bad and I told Andrea around 6pm that it was going to be a great sunset, which it might have been had we actually been able to see the sun…set. Usually the sun hangs like a red ball in the sky. That evening we never even saw the sun it was so smoggy.

So what are we to do when the visibility is so bad we don’t know what to do? When we can’t see very far ahead literally or metaphorically? I guess we will try and simply focus on what and who we can see. So I will continue to pray and ponder in the mornings but if you have any ideas, tell me what to do.


Duncan