This past unit I first went to a local landfill and lived with a scavenging community. Some people were born there, but some migrated there from the countryside as farming continued to lose it's viability and were forced off their land to search for alternative sources of income. Every villager works 8-10 hours everyday at the landfill picking through the tons of trash transported in from Khon Kaen. The night I got in, four us ate dinner and left at 9pm to work in the landfill. For a couple of hours we picked through mounds of rotten produce and plastic bags in the dark with the only source of light coming from a 10 year old headlamp that flickered on and off when i turned my head. We ended up sleeping on top of the landfill in a little Sala until midnight waiting for the night shift of dump trucks until we went back to our house. The next day we sat in another Sala for hours talking to our Meh, Pah and Yai, with them teaching us Isaan (a mix of Thai and Lao that most people speak in this region of Thailand). The community there is amazingly inclusive and warm.
After a couple of days I left the landfill and lived with a family in a slum community inside of Khon Kaen. This homestay was even more amazing as I was determined to communicate with my new family. There were six family members and for my entire stay I continued to engage them in Thai. Not only did I greatly improve my Thai, but I made a much deeper connections with this family than I have with my previous homestays.
It's interesting, I had preconceived ideas of what a slum would look and be like, but this slum (from an outsider's perspective) looked like any other village. It even had a real concrete road (which is which is kind of a big deal). What made it a slum was the lack of property rights since the entire community was squatting the land and the the economic pressures that made them choose to live in a place without long term security.
Landfill:
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