“Hello Sit Down” – The Story of the Slums

Day one visiting the slums – I walked just around the corner from where we stay at the Lighthouse guest house, and my mental jaw dropped.  The road went from a relatively busy street to a complete dead end in the space of two blocks.  At the end of the street was a little sidewalk headed down into the slums district.  We walked down, and it was such a strange dichotomy – here are some of the absolute poorest people in Chiang Mai, but there was electrical power everywhere and some houses even had televisions!  Not all of them did, of course, and the houses were dirt floored and only sometimes fenced in.  The single sidewalk, not ever wide enough for a car, pulls duty as the main street for the neighborhood (so those residents who have motorcycles are constantly traveling up and down on their way to home or town) and as the children’s main play area.  There’s no sign of municipal upkeep, the river runs, dirty and dingy, only a few feet from the completely unguarded edge of the sidewalk, and nobody is wearing clean clothes.

We stopped and prayed at the entrance to the neighborhood, and before we even finished one little boy had run up and started playing with Katie.  We walked in a bit, looking for children to play with, and as I turned the corner I came upon a little boy.  He was probably 7 years old, and it took him approximately one second to register that here was a strange American, who he’d never seen in his life, and leap into my arms.  I was stunned for a moment (not too much to drop the kid, of course!)  I’m not used to this.  I’m a fairly big person when you’re a small kid, and normally the first reaction is to hide behind a convenient corner (or adult).  The second reaction, that I’m safe to play with, usually follows a few minutes later, but there’s frequently a few tense minutes where the kid has to decide if I’m going to eat them or hug them.  This was emphatically not the case here.  I couldn’t speak a word of their language, they’d never seen me before – but because of the history this ministry has with these kids, they just know that when a bunch of twenty-something Americans come to visit, they’re here to play.  My heart leapt – I am never happier than when I’m surrounded by little kids to love on – and I spent the next hour just playing and having fun.

The kids know just a little English – there’s a small English class that meets most nights in the neighborhood – and the most common phrase I heard that day was, “Hello sit down.”  I’d obligingly crouch down, and the kids would pile on me, and then say “ok sit down” meaning they wanted me to stand up.  I’d creak and groan and make funny noises, and stand up as well as I could, kids hanging on as best they could (my record: 5 children) until they eventually fell off and someone would say “hello sit down” again.  I had a blast.  Everything was going great until we got to about 8 kids playing with me.  I have a vague recollection of my team making friends with the parents in the area, but I was completely absorbed in my element.

One little girl in particular became a bit attached to me – and I mean she was constantly on my arm, getting picked up and carried around and played with just like all the other ones.  Orn, our translator, told me her name was Bom.  Because I couldn’t fit all of them on, one time she was left standing on the ground when I stood up.  I think one of the kids must have said or done something mean to her – I’ve never seen children as cruel to each other as these kids – because the next thing I knew she was leaning against a wall bawling her eyes out.  If there’s anything on earth that will move me to immediate action it’s the tears of a little child.  Playtime stopped as I went over and tried to comfort her.  I eventually managed to coax her into sitting in my lap so I could hold her, and as I looked into her eyes I saw such a deep sense of complete worthlessness – nobody in her life had ever told her she was special.  My heart broke completely, and I said to her, “Little girl, I can’t say this in Thai, but I serve a God who speaks all languages, so I hope He translates for me.  You are special.  You are so very special.  God loves you, and I love you, and even if nobody else ever tells you this know that you are loved, and you are special.”  I don’t know how much of that she understood, but her tears dried up and she spent the rest of the time completely attached to me.  She almost followed us all the way home when it was time to leave – and I probably would have let her!  I’ve never seen such a powerful indicator of the way love transcends language and cultural barriers to touch a person’s heart as I did in that one moment with that one little girl.

Now when we go back we play with the kids, and they take us to their houses and back into the street and say “hello sit down” and a whole bunch of words in Thai that mean ‘pick me up’ or ‘put me down’ or ‘take me over to that other foreigner so I can put leaves in her hair’ – but whenever Bom comes out, she goes straight to me and I hold her and play with her and tell her she’s loved.  I might never see her again, but I know she’s in God’s hands, and I know there’s at least one person who will always think she’s pretty special.