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Home in Bangkok
7/24/09
As we - Ann and Crystal - write this blog, Bpah Seen, our 78-year-old host mother, is attempting to wash our dishes.
We’re yelling, “Mai chai! No! We can do it!”
She’s been sitting in her bra on her mattress, staring at us, wondering what we’re doing. She calls us her daughters and refers to herself as “mother.”
We want to give you a picture of where we’ve been living for the past three and a half weeks; we’re fortunate to have host families to guide us through life in the slums on this trek. We live in a comfortable house, though certainly not the nicest in the neighborhood. The front door is patched pieces of wood with an office chair wheel attached to the bottom (so it opens smoothly), the roof is corrugated metal, the walls are scavenged wood and drywall and the foundation is a smooth concrete slab.
The door opens to an outdoor hallway with a tiny cooking area, a bathroom in the back and two rooms to the right. Each room is a little bigger than an average dorm room. We live in the second room with Bpah Seen and her family of six live in the front room.
In the mornings we wake to the neighbors’ activities – egg cooking, water splashing and loogie hacking. At night, when the baby cries, we know it; when the six-year-old gets in trouble, we know it; and we know all the theme songs to the popular soap operas they watch.
The roof leaks when it rains, the water isn’t safe to drink (but is lovely to bathe in after a hot day), and our regular companions are geckos, mice, cockroaches, mosquitoes and spiders. Roosters don’t just crow in the morning. Dogs fight and make strange noises at night. An unstable neighbor a couple of alleys away chants all night long. We do our laundry by hand and hang it in the hallway; if we don’t hang it “properly” everyone in the house feels free to move it around.
When we have down time at home, we hang out with the little boys next door. Baby Ria is a year and four months old. Ween is six years old. We’ve started snapping our fingers with them; they love practicing with us. We taught Ween our Thai names. When we came home the other night, he yelled to his mom, “The falangs have come home!” and to us, “Baideuy, Anchan, gap laayo!”
Bpah Seen loves to talk to us, though we usually have no idea what she’s saying. Sometimes she talks so much, we can’t fall asleep. To her, we’re exciting and hilarious, so we enjoy keeping her company.
It’s been hard, but so much fun. The people make us want to stay. We’ll never think of this type of community the same way, and we know we have so much more to learn. God is beginning to open our eyes.
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