Who is my neighbour?

Today I went to visit my other neighbours. About 500m down the road from my house is a Shan slum. It had a rickety wooden fence around it and the houses are made out of corrugated iron. The children are riding their bikes and playing on the dusty earth. I've assumed it's Shan before even though I've never been into it, because most of these kind of slums are filled with Shan people who have escaped from the oppressive military regime in Burma and work for around $3-$6 a day as construction workers in Thailand. As a result of their work, they often move around from construction site to site, and so they just bring their families and build these slums near their work. However, this one has been there for at least two years now and one guy we spoke to today said that they would stay there. So it's become a way of life.
I see the workers out every morning waiting in blue trousers and shirts by the side of the road. They are waiting to be collected for their jobs, and it's common here to see twelve or more crammed into the back of a ute on the road. I have never actually spoken to them in the one and a half years that I've lived here, perhaps because it's easier to ignore the poverty when you don't have an answer for it. I saw this very clearly a few years ago in Jakarta, Indonesia when I went to document evangelism in desperate slums that were right next to luxury malls. I heard Indonesian Christians who had lived and gone to church right beside these slums for all their lives say, 'We never knew this poverty existed' after they had prayer walked with us through the slum. After that experience, I still occasionally wonder, 'Where are the poor around me? Is there a blind spot in my 'garden'? (The garden is my euphemism for the area that God has assigned for me to take care of - I can't save the whole world, but I can tend my own backyard). Essentially, I'm the guy in Luke 10 asking 'Who is my neighbour?' and I never want to hear back from God 'It's the one you left by the wayside.'
So I spoke with Lydia about it a couple of weeks ago. Lyds is working with the 'Meeting Point' which is a YWAM ministry for Shan people in Chiangmai. Her assignment with them was to go and survey the different Shan slums around Chiangmai so that the ministry could plan their work. So she offered to come with me to visit the slum down the road from me. Also, the main actor from our Shan film, Sai Sai, moved to Chiangmai a week ago and we asked him to come along too. That was a very good move as Sai Sai is so affable that he opens doors everywhere.
Today the three of us walked down from my house carrying plastic bags filled with women's clothing to give away. My plastic bag was filled with clothes left behind from friends who had moved away and couldn't fit everything into their luggage limit. I wasn't really sure what they would make of the farang styles. We walked in through the opening in the wooden fence and saw a few children, but only one guy around. We said 'My song kha' which is hello in Shan and then that pretty much exhausted all the Shan language I know so Sai Sai went on to ask the survey questions. The guy told us that the head guy was not at home but pointed us to other people that lived one row further into the slum. We passed a woman bathing her baby in a plastic bucket and stepped into a skinny alley between the shacks.

Sai Sai stood in an open doorway and chatted away merrily explaining what we were doing. Lyds practiced her Shan that she's been learning with a young guy in the alley. I hid behind them both after answering the usual question about exactly what was I racially (they always guess Korean), and peeped into the one room houses. Cardboard was piled in the gaps between the roof and wall, probably to block the wind. I'm sure everyone could hear everything though. They slept on the floor, but did have electricity. It would be cold at nights, since they only had one layer of iron around them, and I know that I've been chilled sleeping within my cement walls.
I think that's why the lady who took our bag of clothes asked immediately if they were winter jackets. Unfortunately I know that it was mainly light summer clothing in my bag. I don't even have a winter jacket for myself here (my mother made me give my warmest jacket to her at Christmas as she's going to Antartica). I may try to get some jackets though and go back with them.
Sai Sai felt like it would be good for us to build trust and recognition by wandering around the slum for a bit so we walked around and kept talking to people. One middle-aged man was in his blue overalls speckled with paint, obviously his profession. Lydia asked Sai Sai to ask him if he was married. Sai Sai seemed a little bit reluctant, but in the end he did ask it. There was this awkward moment and then he sort of giggled nervously and shook his hands. Sai Sai had to quickly explain that Lydia was only asking because of her work with children, but the man still scurried quickly back into his room. Perhaps he thought he had better escape before the farang proposed to him.
There were over twenty families in that slum. When we reached the end of it there was an open space of dirt between piles of scrap material where kids were playing. One lady had told us that the kids didn't really go anywhere in their free time because it would cost money to take them out on excursions so they just played there in the slum. She suggested that if we were to start a children's program the weekend might be a good time as the kids had nothing else to do. I was surprised to see the towering over the kids' playlot the back of buildings (like the pink one) that I recognised on my street and realised that the slum extended much closer to my house that I had originally thought. We really were neighbours.
Today, the phrase 'Good Samaritan' is in common use and is a positive expression, but I think back in the day in which the parable was told, it would have sounded like an oxymoron to Jesus' listeners. But Jesus used that most ordinary of people, a Samaritan, to express the concept of being a true neighbour - the one who has mercy on them.

The Shan Outreach Centre has a website at http://www.shanoc.com/en/home.html