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Posted: Sat 15:54, 31 Aug 2013 Post subject: 'Angel' makes a career in kindness at the 'Bangkok |
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'Angel' constitutes a career in kindness in the 'Bangkok Hilton' prison
"Susan!" he hollers, suddenly sunny, waving at the woman. "You look beautiful today!"
She laughs and teases in fluent Thai: "Only today,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]?"
For more than a decade,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Susan Aldous has been visiting Bang Kwang, as the maximum security prison is officially known, a few days a week to make good a promise to herself "to turn this place around through getting a smile out of every guard and prisoner.
"It's working, the thing is!" she beams.
But smiles are the least from it. The Australian woman's humanitarian mission is deeper than that, bringing a shaft of sunshine - a little bit of humanity - into dark,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], forgotten corners. The prison is among them. For 2 decades,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the unaffiliated,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], unpaid volunteer has been a constant presence at Bangkok women's shelters, hospital wards,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], slums, and upcountry orphanages, maintaining the needy,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the abandoned, and the despondent - men, women,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], young,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and old.
Today Ms. Aldous is visiting Jaganathan Samynathan. A Malaysian of Tamil ancestry, he's been for 17 years - practically his entire adult life. Sentenced to death in 1992 at age 24 for attempted drug trafficking,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], he was given reprieve in the form of an existence sentence.
Nobody but Aldous has visited him in all his years in this overcrowded, disease-ridden institution where packages and the aid of outside often tip the balance between life and death.
"Susan is making life bearable and worth living,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]," he says from behind a double row of iron bars within the visitors' section.
Thanks to Aldous, says Samynathan, he sleeps in a bed (not on the stone floor) and it has more to eat than the prison's twice-daily staple of rice and bamboo-shoot soup, supplemented on better days with poached rats. He can even study online vocational courses, enabling him to "travel in his mind."
Samynathan is one of many inmates Aldous has embraced in this and many other prisons in Bangkok. She lobbies friends and acquaintances for small donations for hard-up inmates, appears in the court for the kids for royal amnesties,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and appears in holding cells to counsel arrestees as well as in police rehabilitation facilities to nurse junkies. She's laid on feasts for prisoners, got guards new walkie-talkies, and obtained medicine and equipment for the prison hospital.
"In between," Aldous says, "I attempt to do my laundry and brush my teeth."
She's just one mother with no income apart from small donations from strangers, friends, and the relatives of prisoners to cover her $120-a-month apartment that she explains to her 17-year-old daughter. A youthful sprite of a woman, Aldous wears only hand-me-downs and cheap backpacker-style trinkets. She eats curbside meals and walks a lot to save on bus fare. Her neighbors often slip money in envelopes under her door. Besides,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], she adds, "What do I need? I'm 31 years in the future with this particular [humanitarian work], however i have not yet missed meals." (Though she's come close.)
Her goodwill has earned Aldous the epithet "Angel of Bang Kwang" among prisoners - which she dislikes. "I'm not really a Little Goody Two-Shoes, or perhaps a saint,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]," she insists. "But In my opinion every life has a purpose, and that I can be a link inside a chain of events that might help improve lives Body life at any given time with the one life I have to give."
Aldous,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], testifies Talya, her daughter, "doesn't flitter above all of us with angelic melodies to thrill all who suffer. Actually, she's tone-deaf along with a terrible singer. [But] she's the most unselfish being I understand."
• • •
Aldous loves to kiss and hug. Everyone: HIV patients, abandoned women, world-weary transvestites, even a journalist she's just met. She also likes to laugh - guffaw - by throwing back her head in a throaty roar. She creates camaraderie wherever she goes.
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