Anxiety and unity in Bangkok’s biggest slum

[reader]

From Coconuts Bangkok

It’s Friday afternoon and Ratchani Cheausuwan is tired. She’s been standing all day, selling selling snacks with her one usable arm. At the end of the other, her withered right hand is clenched in a permanent fist.

Now she’s waiting for school to let out. The passing children will be her last chance to earn a few baht to keep her daughter’s children fed and in school. Things weren’t always like this. Her daughter used to dance for foreigners in the neon glow of Soi Cowboy, bringing home thousands of baht, worth about US$150 every week. Now she’s broken too. Her first husband died young, and the second abandoned them after serving time in prison.

“To put it plainly, she lost it,” Ratchani, 56, said. “She stopped taking care of her kids. She just lived in her own world; she doesn’t deal with other people. She refuses to acknowledge anything and left me to shoulder all the responsibilities. Even her children, I have to pay for their school expenses. I have to pay 40 baht every day for them to travel to school.”

Her debts are insurmountable and growing. But any chance for the children to live unbroken lives means she has no choice but to push past the exhaustion and despair.

Multiply her story and its variations across the tens of thousands living in Bangkok’s largest slum, where such daily uncertainties and fears have been amplified by government plans to evict them all and “erase” their community to make way for a riverside mall.

When Ratchani was born in the early 1960s, the Khlong Toei community wasn’t the destitute sprawl it is today. The port it grew up around for the past decade was in its heyday. The lure of jobs had led many to accept an open invitation to settle the land under an incentive program that saw few pay rent.

Now just blocks away from the capital’s toniest bars and restaurants, Khlong Toei then was hardly considered Bangkok. Ratchani was about 15 when she ran away from an abusive home in the lesser developed On Nut area and followed her heart to a boyfriend living in Khlong Toei.

Self-reliance is a through line to her life learned early and painfully.

“When I gave birth, he didn’t come. He didn’t care,” she said of the boyfriend upon the birth of their son, who died five years ago of heart disease. “He said something like, “If you can take care of him, good. If not, just send him away.’ He was really cruel; he didn’t care about my feelings at all.”

Five years later, she remembers having to steal a towel from the hospital to carry her newborn daughter back home, alone.

“The hospital had to give me traveling money,” she said. “I didn’t even have a blanket to wrap around my baby.”

A decade ago she moved into a small, rundown residence on two floors in one of Khlong Toei’s several distinct communities. It’s there she supports the four of them by waking up at 4am to get the children to school and make her way to her stall.

“At about 5am, I start traveling to where I sell snacks. I don’t get home until nearly 7pm because I have to clean and wash up,” she said in a recent interview at her home. Despite repeating those 15-hour days five times a week, Ratchani still often comes up short, forcing her to borrow money from friends or loan sharks to get by.

One of Bangkok’s 50 districts, Khlong Toei, or “pandan canal,” was named for the plant that grew along its banks.

The Port Authority owns the land where the community is located, and many consider that fact the end of discussion when it comes to evicting upward of 100,000 people living there. But that concept of land ownership is a relatively modern development established after the community was settled.

When the Siamese capital moved from Ayutthaya to Bangkok over two centuries ago, all land was owned by the king, who could lend, grant or gift it for use. Many of today’s neighborhoods and streets began as such royal gifts.

Up through the mid-20th century, Thailand had abundant land and scarce labor, and people were allowed to take possession of unused land by cultivating it, wrote David Feeny, professor emeritus of economics at Canada’s McMaster University.

Ownership rights based on use and exploitation were left intact when modern property laws involving titles and deeds were written in 1954, just as families were encouraged to settle around the Bangkok Port, which had opened a few years prior between two sharp bends of the Chao Phraya River.

Thailand’s rice boom led to the port’s construction being funded by the World Bank, and nearly all trade passed through it for decades. But even a large expansion couldn’t keep pace with demand, and the opening of a deep-sea port southeast of the capital at Laem Chabang heralded its decline.

Those who settled there to work the docks included immigrants from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and what was then Burma. They formed close-knit supportive neighborhoods, according to research by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Today’s campaign to erase the slum, as one transport official put it, is the latest in a cycle almost as old as the community.

Three years after land-ownership laws were written, in 1957, the port authority sought to force out the dwellings to build a market and other buildings. It succeeded in relocating over 100 households had from what’s called the Lock 6 area to Lock 12. The residents then organized against the expulsions, petitioning the prime minister and physically blocking demolition of homes.

Similar efforts were pushed back in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1983, residents departed voluntarily from some land for the port to develop under a 20-year land-sharing agreement under which claims of both landowner and settlers were recognized, according to Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting.

Continues at

https://coconuts.co/bangkok/features/khlong-toei-rising-anxiety-and-unity-in-bangkoks-biggest-slum/

NOTE -- A related tread can be found at: 

 

[DivineMadman]

FYI

https://southeastasiaglobe.com/the-many-faces-of-khlongtoey/

 

 

[Keithambrose]

Thanks for sharing!