I’ve written some people on my initial experiences in Mae Sot with Compasio, but hadn’t yet started this blog. Partly out of laziness, some parts of this next post will look familiar to some of you. Probably all of you. Why include it, one could wonder, but it seems to me the blog would be lacking without some kind of summary on what Compasio is about, and how much I think they rock.
Compasio strives to show Christ’s love for women and children at risk, mostly displaced Burmese. There are a lot of Burmese refugees here in Mae Sot, fleeing or kicked out by one of the more brutal military-run regimes on Earth. Thailand isn’t perfect either, so a lot of these people, mostly women and children, are exploited for labor and the sex trade and trafficked out to Bangkok and other places. Compasio runs a few shelter homes to try to help them tangibly and show Jesus’s love for them, and I spend some time supplementing the regulars helping out at each. The safehouse is a home for Burmese kids whose parents are very poor, missing, have abused their children, or some combination of these. It is always our goal to keep families together, but sometimes there are safety or other concerns at home that lead us to take children in. A couple of the mothers work there as well, taking care of the children alongside some very giving Thai people on staff. I’ve spent many great evenings there learning worship songs or games, playing with and cleaning up after the kids, and being climbed on! The Baby House is a home for kids whose parents are in prison – sometimes for being Burmese around a grumpy Thai cop, sometimes for theft or for violent offenses – and otherwise don’t have a place to live. The aim of Compasio is to reunite these families, but if the parents fall through after their sentences the Baby House is sometimes an orphanage too. Another awesome Thai couple admirably and selflessly watches after them, teaches them about Jesus’ love for them, and provides them a family. We also run a Drop-In center downtown for street kids to get a meal and play some games at lunchtime before heading back out to the streets again. These kids sometimes have homes and guardians but spend their days foraging and begging to survive, sometimes at the direction of their parents. My favorite thing is to visit the garbage dump, though – there are a couple hundred people who live there in homes they’ve made of garbage, covered in dirt and teeth rotting away, making their meager living sorting through the mountains of trash for recyclables they can sell for pennies a kg. We have a medical role there, bandaging wounds and changing dressings (everything gets infected when you live at the dump) and taking people to a small clinic in town in an old Land Rover that used to belong to the Swiss Red Cross. My role is simply driving, holding limbs or squirting saline solution, or occupying other curious children while the real talent does the work, but it is phenomenal to see the healing happen and watch the trust develop. In addition to the rotations at the shelters, I have the opportunity to help out with some of the nuts and bolts type things that need done around here – roofs, lights, vehicles, that sort of thing. It’s fun, challenging, and rewarding, and I have yet to do any permanent damage.
Organizationally, that is a quick summary – there are other ministries at work, such as our Monday evening soccer games with the street kids, but I’ll touch on those later. J
Compasio is looking at expansion in the next year as a possibility. There are other border towns with similar needs…please pray with us on if/how best to expand, the timetable, and the people that would have to make it happen. Thanks for reading! For more, see http://www.compasio.org/.
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