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People I Have Met in the Field 129 129 COLUMN SERIES People I Have Met in the Field Support Given to the Poorest of the Poor I first met Phii I, a member of the inner-city community S, even before my research had officially begun. If memory serves correctly, I was walking around the community with a member of an NGO when I saw her. I was standing and chatting with a family who owned a grocery shop and a food stall that faced one another inside a narrow alleyway. Phii I, staggered up with a plate. She seemed inebriated. The woman who owned the food stall was welcoming and piled a heaping amount of food on her plate. I remember being told that the woman occasionally gave Phii I food. After my research began and I began to spend longer amount of time in the community, I ran into Phii I nearly every day. Her daily work consisted of gathering garbage from local households and cleaning the roads, after this she would take the accumulated refuse to the nearby community garbage dump. She was paid from a local fund meant for community maintenances and services. Garbage collection is the work that the community prepared as a way to help some of its members. In this case, the work helped Phii I, who had difficulties in earning a living. After dark, I often saw her stumbling around cheerfully while heavily inebriated. As we spent more time together, we became closer and began to discuss many things. When I first met Phii I, she was in her mid-thirties and lived with her two children, who were in elementary school, and her husband, a day labourer. Apparently, as a teenager she had been trafficked to southern Thailand, and was later rescued by a Thai NGO. She then returned to Bangkok, and helped out at the NGO for a year before coming to live in the community. 130 Living with Risk Given her early history, it was not easy for Phii I to find stable employment. Although she had at one time worked irregularly as a day labourer on construction sites, she later became a local garbage collector due in part to the mediation of a respected member of the community named “M”. Phii I worked earnestly at her day job, but would drink heavily every night. I wondered how she was feeding her children with her unstable income, and realised after some time that the children often received food from other community members. M, who took diligent care of the community’s library, would often praise Phii I for her hard work during the daytime—but then scold her at night for her drunken behaviour. Phii I self-identified as the poorest member of the community, and was identified as such by other locals as well. Once, when I showed several local community members a map on which I had identified the households to be included in a random sampling for my research, they pointed to her house and asked me why it was not included, explaining that she and her family were extremely poor. I once ran into Phii I on the street. She was crying and clasping her cheek, and asked “Can you please give me 100 baht? My tooth hurts badly, but I can’t afford the dentist fee.” Although I often wondered whether I should be giving community members money or not, regardless of the amount in question, in this case I did not hesitate. Even had I not given her the money, I am certain she would have been able to secure it from another local resident. In any case, I ran into her later that day. She was happily drunk and reported that the pain was completely gone. Economic relations in this community were relatively business-like, however. Outsiders tend to expect that relationships among those living in urban “slums” are “tight”, “mutually helpful” and “rural-like”. Although it was indeed the case that most people in both communities did leave their doors open and often engaged in close-knit communication, it was also true that both the type and the extent of these relations differed greatly depending upon the community in question. Within individual communities themselves, moreover, the way that such relationships were expressed tended to differ with respect to both time and occasion. After the fire in inner-city community S, for example, people often drew closer to their families and extended...

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