Week 12 - The One About the Massage

Fact: the average meal here is around 90 cents, the sort of meal you would easily pay $9.00 for at Royal Thai on Greenville.

Outreach twice again this week. We spent a little time visiting with people we already knew, handing out Thai workbooks and pencils to the little ones. I am lost in these relationships, those which can seemingly go no further than "How are you." If they happen to say they are not well, and I ask why, I will not understand what they say after that. At times like these, I have to believe the eternal Logos is also preached in mystery, apart from the spoken gospel, that Christ in me is enough and that the Spirit will shout grace and mercy in a way that surpasses me.

An aside on the subject of mystery: does anyone think there's a link between Eastern Orthodox and the Southern USA pentecostal tradition? I've been obsessed with this question lately.

We discussed Nouwen's Compassion on Thursday. Nouwen writes in riddles, but there were a couple of edifying concepts in the essay. Mainly, that of presence. Nouwen aims in the beginning to dismiss the idea of compassion as a condescending pity, a common misconception. Compassion, for Nouwen, and I think accurately, is sharing the suffering of your neighbor. The practical manifestation of this becomes a question with in impossible number of answers, but Nouwen happens to mention sharing awkwardness as one of them. Sitting with a beggar who is likely Cambodian and knows little Thai, when you yourself already know little Thai, is assuredly one of the most awkward things I have done. Nouwen's exhortation is not to run from that awkwardness, not to exist in frantic impatience that desires only to run away from the moment, but to share the awkwardness with them in your brief relationship. It sounds goofy, but it rings more true than the noble fantasies of "compassion" in my head.

On Tuesday, our Thai friend Boo came over and cooked for us. Boo keeps outdoing herself in the cooking department. This time it was a yellow curry over noodles and sauteed garlic. I aim to try and recreate her achievements when I return home, but I doubt they will come close.

This week, I began my WMF project. My goal is to locate squatter communities around Bangkok. This mostly entails walking a lot. On Monday, it entailed some dude stalking me for a few blocks with a big stick. I wouldn't have minded so much if he'd actually swung the big stick or done anything for that matter, but whenever I turned on him, he just gave me a blank stare. He was either an imbecile or very high. Regardless, he left me a few blocks later.

The squatter communities are a mixture of depressingly inadequate and surprisingly tranquil. Grigg in his book Companion to the Poor distinguishes between several types of squatter communities. They are not all places of despair, although there are those. Some are highly organized, insular communities that care for their citizens. All of them exist on unclaimed property, often near a railroad track or canal. Some of them have been around for decades. I encounterd suspicious individuals, as mentioned above, but I also encountered the characteristic Thai generosity. As I walked through one community, an older gentleman came out to stop me from continuing, saying, in English, "Um, that one, he bite," as he pointed to a dog directly in front of me.

I got my payoff massage for winning the "new experience/extrem food" contest of a couple months ago. It was a real swank place. They washed our feet to begin--Tim and Jeff came along--and gave me some very loose-fitting pajamas to change into. I think she gave me the foreigner, "I'm trying not to hurt you" version of the classic Thai massage. She could have twisted me a lot further than she did, but it was nice. There was pan flute music. And then they gave us tea.

Prayer Requests:

--That I would work on my project when I have free time. Time is getting short.