How do I share about my first two weeks as a missionary in Bangkok? Well, first of all, I don’t feel like a missionary yet– more like a small child. So much here is unfamiliar. I had to learn how to use the bathroom all over again (the “squatty-potty”), people have to lead me anywhere I want to go, and to order food I have to rely on pointing and grunting. I can’t even sound out the words on signs here because it’s in an entirely different script. It is very humbling! But also exciting as I embrace a new culture and life.
Instead of giving you a day-by-day account of what I’ve been up to, I think I’ll mostly post snapshots of life here. The first will be of Permsup, my new home.
Permsup is a community of about 120 families living in mostly one- or two-room shacks built on stilts over a swamp. We are in the shadow of a driving range and a massage parlor, a short stroll from a large informal market within sight of modern cars, buses and convenience stores. The walls of the houses are plywood and the roof is corrugated metal, making it sound like you’re in a tin can during the downpours (we’re at the end of the rainy season right now). Holes in the walls and floors allow little lizards and various sized roaches to come in and out, but happily they try to find the first exit once they realize you’re in the room.
Jen and I use one room of our house as a shared bedroom and the other as a kind of “main room” which at the moment consists of a small refrigerator and a low table (the kind you eat at while sitting on the floor– chairs are almost never used in the homes here. In fact, meals are most often laid out on the floor, too). We have hopes of getting some mats or other things to sit on, but probably won’t have a full kitchen, at least for awhile– meals from the numerous street vendors are rarely over 75 cents, so making our own wouldn’t save much money but would be a demand on our time.
The other room is our bedroom. We sleep on thick mats under a mosquito net, and burn coils to smoke them out, too. We have a couple sets of plastic drawers and a fabric enclosed wardrobe thing. We wash our clothes at a nearby store and then hang them to dry outside. Our bathroom is a kind of outhouse located just out our front door, with a squatty-potty and giant urn for bucket showers.
The conditions are really rough, but mostly it just feels like camping. Still, I can’t imagine raising a family here. There are mangy dogs and cats around and some sketchy characters in other parts of the community. But most of the people here are so friendly. Our landlord, Chai, and his family have been really helpful and are looking out for us. Chai’s wife Lin even did my laundry for me the other day. On a daily basis one of our neighbors or someone Dave knows will invite us in for a meal and to teach us some Thai phrases. There are adorable kids running around and plenty of people stopping by our house to chat (or gesture and smile, in our case).
Permsup, along with most of the 1,000+ slum communities in this city, are largely Isaan. The families migrated here from the Northeast looking for work and have been mostly confined to low-income jobs such as construction, bus fare collection, and selling food or goods in the informal economy. Thai is their second language, though they are fluent, and we hope to eventually also learn Isaan, their heart language.
There are my observations so far. More later!
