Angels of the slums
Bangkok Post April 20, 1997

SELFLESS: Living amidst crime and violence, underprivileged people in Bangkok's biggest slum community are learning to help others even worse off than themselves CHITRAPORN VANASPONG

In July last year, Sampao Wiangpai's younger sister died of Aids, leaving behind two young orphaned children. Sampao is now 50, but she can never forget her experience. "Since I am a community committee member, I know about Aids through the Aids Control Campaign here in Klong Toey.

"It is my job to talk to people in my community about Aids issues and I give them relevant information. "But, honestly, I never thought it would happen to anyone in my family."

Too close for comfort: Sampao learned that her sister was infected with HIV. Like many women, she contracted it from her husband.
"I disagreed when she decided to marry this person. I said then that he would give her problems. After her marriage failed, I told her to rent a house nearby. The man moved in with another woman, but he came to visit his kids frequently.

"When I learned that he was ill, we went to visit him. At first glance, I knew right away that evil already haunted him. And I knew it was going to happen to my sister." He died in July 1995, not long after the symptoms appeared.

Sampao then took her sister for a blood test. As expected, she was HIV positive. Knowing that her sister needed support, Sampao told her sister and two daughters to move into her house. "At first I was a bit worried," Sampao confessed, "to have an HIV carrier living with me. I asked all the experts I knew and tried to confirm that I would be all right, that I couldn't get the virus by eating, drinking, or by living under the same roof with an HIV carrier. "Besides, she is my own sister, and I am the only one who cares about her. So I was more worried."

Aside from supporting her financially, taking her to the doctor, and taking care of her daughters, Sampao also suppported her
emotionally. "She was hopeless then," Sampao said. "She didn't want to see the doctor. She didn't care about herself. She only told me over and over again to take good care of her children. "I had to encourage her to be hopeful and I told her that she was going to be all right. I found her all kinds of herbal medicines just to make her feel that there is still some hope. I did this until she passed away," Sampao said.

Strength from tragedy: Against all possible discrimination from her neighbours, Sampao decided to be open about her family's
situation. "The gossip circle here is so small. People already knew about it when her husband died. And my sister didn't want to hide. She herself always warned young men who frequently visited prostitutes to be careful because life is so precious."

Unexpectedly, the family got support from their neighbours. "I remember the day she died," Sampao recalled. "She was unconscious just before she passed away. There were lots of people in my house trying to help. "Some of them even lent me money when we didn't have enough to pay for the doctor. Some of them helped us by taking care of the children while we went to see the doctor."

Taking strength from her own experience, Sampao went on supporting other families with Aids patients and carriers in her community.
"There is a man living nearby who has Aids. I just told the family, 'take care of him as best and as long as you can. Just look at how I took care of my sister.' " "So, they can see that it is all right to take care of someone with Aids because I am still alive and healthy," she said.

Hope in a mudhole: Highly reputed as one of the major sources of evils - poverty, violence, crime, drugs, and now also Aids, the Klong Toey community now shelters some 600 HIV carriers. Most are men but 120 of them are housewives. The Aids carriers include 72 who are sex workers working in the community, and 28 of them are children. And last year alone, 18 died of Aids.

Nitaya Prompawcheunboon, head of Duang Prateep Foundation's Aids Control Programme, pointed out that the trend of Aids infection has changed during her eight years of working there. "At first, most of the HIV carriers were male drug users, but lately we have found that more women are infected with HIV, including sex workers and housewives," said Nitaya.

The campaign on Aids prevention in Klong Toey community dogged the footsteps of the campaign against drugs. "We started the campaign against drugs in our in community in 1987," recalled Nitaya. "Part of our job then was to send drug users to Tanyarak Hospital for treatment. "I remember we sent the first group of drug users to the hospital in 1987. The next morning, the doctor called us and said that one was HIV positive." He was not accepted by the hospital, and Nitaya had to bring him back. "At that time, I had no idea what Aids is. I didn't know what to do. We just took him back to his family and he went on living the way he used to."

Learning from mistakes: It happened again when two out of 25 drug users sent to hospital for treatment were rejected. But it seemed to be a real big issue when in 1988, 13 out of 25 drug users were found to be infected with Aids. "We made the mistake of holding a press conference. We wanted to announce that there are 16 HIV carriers in the Klong Toey slum community. Our purpose was to show society that we also face this crisis. "After being headlined in the newspapers, all the HIV carriers were immediately driven out of their houses. We had to shelter them in the community centre."

Aside from being thrown out by their own families, the HIV carriers were also rejected by their own neighbours. After the newspaper headlines, a group of community members held a rally to exile the HIV carriers out of their community. From that, Nitaya knew that misunderstanding about the deadly disease can derail the Aids Prevention Education Programme. She then started the Aids Control Programme, funded by the Duang Prateep Foundation.

"We started by talking to the families of the 16 HIV carriers to convince them that they can still continue living their normal lives while taking care of their sick family members. "But that was not enough. We had to work on the whole community as well," said Nitaya.
Part of her programme is to sponsor milk for the children HIV carriers, to provide money for HIV carriers, for Aids patients, and for their families to invest in small businesses after they are forced to quit their jobs.

More importantly, the programme deals with the attitudes of people. "Our job is gigantic, but our resources are very limited. So we had to train volunteers. We selected housewives in the community to help us work. Now we have about 350 volunteers helping us."
The way they work: As those infected with the virus develop Aids sooner or later, hospitals are unable to shelter all the Aids patients until they pass away. Of course, there are hospital beds for acute cases.

Families and communities are the main sources of patient care in this case, and the residents of Klong Toey community are learning this lesson. What is interesting here is the way they work. "I think poverty makes people understand each other's hardship. People living in poor communities are very kind-hearted," said Nitaya. "They are natural carers, like people who take care of each other in rural communities. They know who is infected with Aids. They take care of those people, and keep whatever secret need to be kept."
In many quiet cases, the volunteers themselves shell out their own money for the Aids victims' funeral or ticket fare to go back home.

But charity is not the keystone of social work here. "Of course, it's not only about giving them money or taking them to the hospital. We, the workers, also develop ourselves," said Nitaya. Being one of the slum-dwellers, her education only reached the level of primary school. Her participation in the programme has helped her learn a lot more about social development.

This is also the case with Sompit Tangwachirapanya, a 40-year-old housewife, who works as a voluteer for the Aids control
programme. She first joined the scheme because, in her own words: "My husband left me and our three daughters. I had no money. I had nothing to do to make a living," she said.

Nitaya recounted how Sompit came to the foundation to find a job, crying. Now Sompit's mission is to visit Aids carriers and patients, and to take them to the hospital twice a week. "It is easy for me to work because I am one of them," she said. "They trust me and tell me everything, and that makes the job easier."

She found that helping others cures her own wounds too. "After I see their plight, I realise that my hardships were nothing. I tell myself that if these people are still hopeful, I should be too," said Sompit. And this is how, in a community regarded by the rest of society as being "low," things work out in favour of the good souls.
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1997
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Last Modified: Mon, Apr 21, 1997