19th March, 2010

JIM REIHER

I just spent a month in Thailand with Urban Neighbours of Hope (UNOH). I am back at my desk. I am trying to plan work for my students who are doing a year with UNOH full time. But I am distracted by my wandering thoughts.

How can two places on the same planet be so radically different from each other at the same time? How can we have so much of everything that we have large houses full of things, a garage bulging with excess possessions, and back shed full as well while the people I met lived in one or two rooms, their homes not much bigger than my garage, with a few sticks of furniture, electricity that looks like it is tapping into someone else’s electricity, and a single cold water tap coming into the house through a hole in the wall (giving cold water that can’t be drunk but which can be used to flush down the hole used for a toilet, or poured on yourself as your shower each day)? There is no proper sewerage system, and some of the houses are directly over the channels that direct tens of thousands of people’s waste to...I never found out.

How can I have political freedom and the right to ridicule my leaders (if I feel so inclined) but the Burmese refugees we met on the Thai Burma border spend 10 years in jail sleeping on concrete floors, and being systematically tortured, for doing something similar there?

How can I run a small library for UNOH and have a range of books on the shelf, including books that disagree with each other, and disagree with different politicians in my country, but I meet a man in Mae Sot (on the Thai Burma border), who had to flee Burma, and leave his family behind, because of the same activity?

How can I be comfortable in the security that my home won't be bulldozed by the government, when others live under the constant possibility that such a thing could happen to their humble dwellings (to allow the port authority more space to put containers that are full of those things that keep our houses and garages and back sheds full)?

How can I have the amazing gift of security and peace, stability and economic prosperity, while others live and die at the whims of their less than ideal governments? How can I have sick pay and holiday pay and Centrelink as a back up, when the people I met go hungry if they miss a day’s work?

UNOH has a wonderful presence in the Klong Toey slum in Bangkok (Thailand’s biggest slum of up to nearly 100,000 people living in two square kilometers). If I wanted to sound like a Catholic I would be tempted to say that the UNOH folk there are “saints”. But I won’t say that, lest we write off their example all too easily by doing so. You know: make someone a saint, and you can ignore them can't you...because they are special and you and I are just ordinary followers of Christ. No, they are not “saints” in that sense. But they are great examples of ordinary Christ-followers sharing their lives with the very poor.

And they make a gentle but very real difference in the lives of their neighbors and friends, as they live life with them. On the night before I left Thailand, a house church of both Thai’s from the slum, and their UNOH worker friends, had a dinner and farewell for those who had visited them. As I looked around I realised that if the UNOH workers had not come, these Thai members of the church, would never have found faith in Christ, and a number of them would still be stuck in the way of so many of their neighbors: prostitution, drugs, superstition and desperate poverty. Instead I saw people in successful micro-enterprises, full of joy, hope, faith and love.

World’s collide.   

Jim Reiher is the training coordinator for the Urban Neighbours of Hope.

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