Casa de Samaritan Homeless Shelter
CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF CONFLICT
Homelessness has always been one of the biggest problems in Thailand. It is a usual sight to find the community living on the streets or under bridges. I became interested in the homeless shelter as the concept is not as widely known of in my country and I had never before thought about the problem in details. With this, I decided to join the Casa de Samaritan Homeless Shelter to explore it more.
Throughout the semester, the focus of the ExEd was on tackling the global issue of homelessness. Each one of us was given an assignment since the first day to research about the homelessness situations in our countries and to present to the group about it. The numbers were surprising to me as I realized that the problem is in fact affecting a larger community than I thought. This discussion on the first day served as the motivation for me throughout my time in the ExEd.
After our first meeting, I had the chance to visit the Casa de Samaritan Homeless Shelter. Not knowing what homeless shelters were before, I became fascinated by the location, especially the closet, bedrooms, and bathrooms, as I did not expect the shelter to also provide any other goods or services than food.
There were numerous tasks to be done. With the group, I had organized the closet, served food, organized the food shelves, and creating a plan on a new mural. Though one thing that I hold as the most valuable was talking to the people. Here, I realized the stereotypes imposed on the homeless people The myths of homeless people I had been exposed to painted them as merely addicts who would not follow the rules and laws and are dangerous to the society. However, just by sitting and talking to them, I realized that most of them were not true at all. There were a lot of causes to homelessness and there were also people who just chose to live on the streets out of their comfort. A lot of the people were high educated and I have had with them interesting conversations regarding problems in the society. The experience was entirely new to me and I deeply appreciate this exposure that had completely altered my perspective of the homeless community.