An afternoon in the slum

Armed with two bags of used clothing, my group was packed into the back of a pickup and ferried to the slum area to visit a few of the students attending Kon Kian Christian School. Despite the fact I was already briefed on their living condition, I was totally unprepared for what I was about to experience.

We were greeted by a long narrow alley only wide enough for a tricycle to pass. The alley was cordoned by concrete and dilapidated zinc walls which formed the walls of adjoining homes. The air was stale as we inched closer into the heart of the slum. After a few minutes of silent walking, the alley opened up into a corridor with rows of homes made from wood, concrete and corrugated metal.

We stopped at the home of one of our students. Our guide shared with us that the girl's dad has left the family, and her sister and her were subsisting on her mother's meagre income she got from collecting used cardboard and bottles. At her front door was a pushcart with things that we would wantonly discard as rubbish, yet these were the very things that kept this family alive.

A few doors down, we met another family. A little child was knocked down by a motorcycle, and with little money for proper treatment, the helpless mother could only hold the child close to her bosom hoping for a miracle. Yet a few doors down, another child was waiting for her parents to visit her from Bangkok. She has been abandoned by her parents to be looked after by her aged grandparents.

I also saw an old woman sitting at the doorway of her poorly-lit home, staring impassively into the void. She looked haggard and unwashed, and her eyes conveyed a sense of helplessness that lingered in that place.

Everywhere we turned we saw little children with bruises, wearing oversized clothes too big for them, playing in the cool evening as the day drew to a close. With little money, many of these children would end up leaving school early. Yet it was a relief to see the smiles of little children amidst the shackling poverty, a little respite from an otherwise sobering afternoon.


As I looked at the two little bags, it dawned on me how little we could really offer. Giving away used, discarded clothing was a tiny drop in an ocean. Confronted with abject poverty, we were all convicted of a sense of helplessness that only God could overcome. We prayed for those in need, perhaps the only thing we could do. We empathized and for that moment we could feel the grief God must feel as He watches his creation suffered.

As we passed each doorway with its own sad story to tell, I knew that we would never be the same again.