A Home in the Shack

Kun Sombat invited me to their routine community outreach. They do it once in a while, to ensure the aid is available for the need. So out we go with packets of daily products and food. The ice-cream like cookies in the plastic bags, wow, never seen it again since I live in Kuala Lumpur.


We dressed in Yellow and walked around the slums of Suan Oi and Ban Kuay, with two big plastic bags on our hands. It was a very hot sunny days. The staffs in yellow look like angels as I see them seeking for the needy ones and hand out the plastic bags. Yeah, they don’t just give everybody. If so they are not doing their jobs. They asked the people in the slums the name of people that are in trouble. Then they surveyed about their family members and what they are doing.


One family of ten we visited were basically living in a shack, barely 6 x 4 feet square, consist from new born baby and up till the old grandmother. The young teenage girl is studying with the scholarship support from Mercy Centre. The slums are mostly built roughly under big highways and dirty still river. I took a picture at a bridge right on the still river, filled with insects and eggs, never seem so on a photo. One staff joked that it is yet another Venice.





These were the support Mercy Centre gives to the community besides the Home for orphanage and HIV/Aids Hospice. Some people thought they have got enough money because of the big office building and the Aid Hospice house accommodating few hundreds of staffs and children. Is aid ever enough for the community that is filled with drug problems, family problems and poverty?