The poor at my door

This evening Thomas* came to my door again AGAIN. It has been a while since he was here so I guess I shouldn’t be too upset but I certainly wasn’t too happy. What can I do for him? Is he lying again? What difference does it make? whether I help and whether he is lying?

I listened to what he said – that he had worked for thirty days, but that his manager had told him not to come back for seven days. Now, three days further down the road the family went without food again AGAIN. Why his father wasn’t taking part in the governments 100-days work programme that all the poor are part of – he was drinking. Why he didn’t have money after three days without work – they only paid sixty taka a day. Why he had been asked to not come back to the brick field where he had worked – don’t know.

I know the owner so without thinking much about it I called him. I didn’t get to say anything except that Thomas was in my living room. The owner asked me to give Thomas the phone and after a few minutes of talking to Thomas, the owner told me that Thomas had not been turning up for work, and when he had it was often late – but he could come back tomorrow.

Why he hadn’t been going every day – because it was hard work. Why he hadn’t gone on time – it was early in the morning or not enough time to eat.

There is no doubt that the manager is less than pleasant to work for, that they treat Thomas like a dog and that he probably can’t do things well enough for them, but the owner of the kiln has given other children the chance before and helped them learn to drive a tractor, helped them get skills that would help them get good work elsewhere. I am sure the owner isn’t easy to work for either.

I asked Thomas whether he wanted to become like his dad or take the abuse he gets in order to make sure he doesn’t. I also ask him to make sure he was at work by seven tomorrow and every day from now on, since I had risked my prestige by asking that he get his job back.

I didn’t tell him I was as surprised as he that that is what the brick kiln owner did when all I wanted to know was whether Thomas was telling the truth when he said he had been asked to not come back for seven days.

I wish I could choose which poor people come to my door; if that had been the way it worked perhaps Thomas would have had the choice not to be one.

*(Thomas’ real name isn’t that; he is no more than 15 years old.)

How would you like your ants

Life is full of little problems and sometimes they come in great numbers. A little over a week ago, or perhaps it was two, I got to my dining table and found that there were ants in the muesli I had been saving for special occasions. I shook the bag – that usually disturbs them enough to make them scramble for the little hole through which they had come. The only problem with this was that it also disturbed the content of the bag, seriously hampering any evacuation attempts they made. I ended up pouring the whole thing into a flat plastic container with a lid and when I couldn’t tease more ants out I folded a piece of soft tissue paper, put it in a corner of the container, put the lid on and left it in the fridge a couple of hours before I took the tissue paper and the few assembled ants out. I repeated the treatment once and think I got them all.

The ants, however, had been so encouraged by the supply of food that they were not deterred by the slight setback of the muesli and immediately went into the toaster.

Toasted ants are probably full of good protein, but I still prefer my peanut-butter-chocolate-spread-and-banana sandwich to be without ants so I cleaned it as best I could. It has a removable tray at the bottom which needed to have every crumb removed before the toaster was safe. Keeping a toaster free of crumbs is not easy so I ended up heating it up and then putting it on top of my fridge – the ants haven’t found it yet.

One should think that that my peanut-butter-chocolate-spread-and-banana sandwich would be safe now, but things aren’t that easy.

The bread box had a little hole in the corner of the lid and before long the bread was crawling in ants. Last time this happened my ayah baked the bread which made the ants crawl as far away, the only way they could; into the bread before they died from the heat. That is how I know I don’t like them in my peanut-butter-chocolate-spread-and-banana sandwich. I had learned my lesson and simply gently brushed the ants off into the sink and decided that from now on my bread would have to be in the fridge, even if that does make it hard.

There was now nothing left on my dining table that didn’t have a screw on lid on it – except for the powdered milk so that is where they went. I spent a good hour rescuing the poor ants from the milk powder. As soon as I tried to scope one out the surface would disappear under four others. I tried to keep track of the problem, but ended up minutely going through the whole container until every little wriggling black spot had been removed. Finally I had learned my lesson and there were no more ants on my dining table – except for when I was eating and they would scamper down from the ceiling to see if they could eat the toast out of my hands.

Then came the kitchen; they found a way into a plastic container and into a packet of noodles. Fortunately we could wash them right of the noodles before Alan, a shorttermer, cooked a delicious Chinese meal for me. I checked every other container on the shelf in my kitchen. I think the ants were watching. I didn’t find any more ants so I heaved a sigh of relief right until I pulled out the wooden ladle which was crawling in ants. They were eating the end of it. I silently blamed Alan for not having cleaned it. It is kind of nice to be able to blame someone, even when I have to be humble enough to not do it to his face. I scrubbed the ladle with soap and put it back in the tray. It was crawling in ants almost instantaneously again and it probably wasn’t Alan who washed it in the first place anyway.

I said the ants were watching for the next day they were in one of the containers I had checked. They were eating dry spaghetti. There were no ants in the bag when I checked the day before, but they had managed to find a weak point in the metal lid on my spaghetti tin, pried it open and gone straight through the plastic bag to munch on my spaghetti.

These ants are persistent and hard working. I don’t know what they will be in when I get home today. I just wonder if the ants pray as much as I do about life's problems and I pledge to be as diligent as they in solving the problems that I face.

Picture Quiz

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Simple giving

I always find giving difficult; there are the beggars whom I might give a few taka because it puts a quick end to the encounter, but I know that I have given them no lasting help; there are the friends who need a little money to get out of a sticky situation, and for whom I will go from being a friend to a benefactor if I help; and there are the habitual beggars who think it is always worth a try to see if they can get something and so ask.
On Tuesday I had the privilege of being able to help without any of these issues. A family of four; Ratan aged six in a white 'dhoti' with his sisters Ratna in class five and Shampa who was barely two years old and finally their mother whose name and age I don't know.
Ratan was the one doing the begging, wearing just a white cloth around his waist and a white thread over his right shoulder it wasn't difficult to see that this was a family in mourning - and being that he was the only male, and thereby the most senior member of the family - it was he who stated the facts; They were begging for food and money because his father had died seven days ago.
They were happy to share their names and what class they were in at school, and also that they were from Kalibari not too far from LAMB. The father had suddenly died - my guess would be a heart attack, but I don't think they know. I even got a smile from Shampa who was obvious too little to understand, and from Ratan who with a hole where his two front teeth were missing was clearly too young for the responsibility that had now become his let alone to comprehend it.
It was easy and a joy to be able to give - not that they will have been greatly helped - but they were obviously in a situation where they needed help, they weren't abusing a relationship to get something they didn't deserve and this wasn't a bad habit.
Please take a minute to pray for this family.