Light relief from the lady known as Angel

Dressed as an angel, a petite blonde Australian woman flitted about the auditorium, hugging participants and lecturing about the healing power of love and laughter. Australia's Susan Aldous prescribes laughter as the best medicine. Called the Angel of Bang Kwang, she is a ray of sunshine for underprivileged Thais - from inmates at a maximum security prison to women and children in shelters, writes Tibor Krausz in the Sydney Morning Herald.

At a recent symposium in Bangkok, hundreds of health-care professionals from across Thailand were treated to an unusual spectacle. Dressed as an angel, a petite blonde Australian woman flitted about the auditorium, hugging participants and lecturing them about the healing power of love and laughter.
Susan Aldous wore a white chiffon costume, with fluffy wings and a sequined tiara - a clumsy mixture, as she puts it, of Snow White and Bridal Best circa Word War II.

Yet the outfit wasn't simply a publicity gimmick.
Melbourne-born Aldous is widely known in Thailand as the Angel of Bang Kwang. She has earnt the epithet with her dedicated volunteer work with inmates - many of them serving life sentences for drug offences - at the notorious maximum-security prison outside Bangkok, where she is friends with prisoners and guards alike.
But she does so much more.
Invited to act as titular mascot for a Thai national hospital institution, the high-school drop-out was at the symposium to teach doctors and nurses about humanised health care.
Her credentials: decades-long devotion to helping the needy, the neglected and the down-and-out at countless hospital wards, women's shelters, refugee camps, or anywhere else she can find them.
"My past is my PhD in this work. In the course of my work I've been called an angel but I've never [been asked] to dress up as one," she laughs.
A few days later, Aldous demonstrates her modus operandi.
During her weekly visit to a women's shelter on the outskirts of Bangkok, she waves to a group of women - battered wives, rape victims, single mothers - unwinding in the shelter's shady yard. Children mob her. Some have been rescued from sexual exploitation or sweatshop-style slavery. Between hugs, Aldous hands them toys and chocolates - two each so they can donate one to a sibling or friend.
"This way they learn they never lose by giving, if only a smile or a helping hand," she explains before proceeding with an English lesson for them.
On weekends in Bangkok, Aldous also holds birthing and laughing yoga classes for expectant mothers and has parties for residents. Recently, as part of her drama therapy sessions, she staged a play with several battered children at the shelter to emphasise an anti-violence message. The children performed to popular acclaim at Thailand's National Human Rights Commission.
"Sister is so kind to us. No one else cares about us," says Oy, an emaciated woman at the shelter who has AIDS. Her 13-year-old son is cared for in a Buddhist monastery but she doesn't tell her family where she is, so as not to brand them with the stigma of her disease.

The two women hug, tears in their eyes. Momentarily, though, Aldous begins joking with Oy in fluent Thai and they both laugh, in line with Aldous's philosophy that laughter is the best medicine.
Everywhere else Aldous goes, from crowded cells to hospital wards, her bubbly, instant camaraderie seems infectious.
"She's relit my beacon," says Martin Zweiback, a Hollywood producer who met Aldous by chance during a holiday in Thailand. He credits her compassion and buoyant optimism with his revitalised will to live after his wife's death from cancer three years ago.
"I felt my life was over," he says. "Then I watched Susan going about the slums of Bangkok with a shining spirit and a bright smile. I saw her hugging a double murderer with such compassion. But forgive me for drifting into Pollyanna land as there's nothing Pollyanna about Susan."
A single mother with no income, Aldous, 47, lives hand-to-mouth in a small rented apartment with her 17-year-old daughter near Bang Kwang. She is a youthful, pretty sprightly woman who wears hand-me-down clothes and backpacker-style trinkets. Aldous lives on kerbside meals and walks a lot to save on bus fares. Her Thai neighbours often slip money in envelopes under her door.
"What do I need?" she says. "I'm 31 years down the road with [humanitarian volunteer work] but I haven't yet missed a meal." A born-again Christian, she still has in her some of the hellraiser she once was.
An orphan raised by foster parents in an upper-middle class part of Melbourne, Aldous became a rebel in her early teens. Dropping out of school, she was, at times, a spaced-out flower child with bird bones and feathers dangling from ears (Mary Poppins on crack, she jokes); a skinhead biker in military fatigues; and a proto-punk complete with tattoos, safety-pin piercings and shaved eyebrows.
She was nicknamed "Petrol Head" for sniffing petrol, glue and aerosols. She'd slash herself with razor blades.
"I was angry at the world and rebelled at a predictable life in the suburbs," she says.
Burnt out and jaded, she thought of suicide. Then in Melbourne's red-light district, St Kilda, she encountered Christian aid workers, one of whom suggested: "If you're going to throw your life away, why don't you instead give it away?" "Compassion has been my drug of choice ever since," Aldous says.
While volunteering as a welfare worker in South-East Asian slums and prisons, she arrived in Thailand in 1985 on a nine-day visit - and has never left. She has just launched a campaign to raise awareness of gender issues in Thailand, where spousal abuse of women is still widespread. As part of this drive, Aldous has also submerged herself in the marginalised world of the country's renowned third gender - ladyboys, as transvestites and transsexuals are known locally.

As a frequent visitor to Bangkok's Boys Town, a gay strip with rowdy bars and transvestite shows, she counsels ladyboys, warning them against prostitution and drug abuse.
She has just published a book of interviews with ladyboys, to provide a view past the stereotypes.
"Susan touches a lot of lives," says her Thai co-author, Pornchai Sereemongkonpol. "At first I was suspicious of her motives, then you see the way she treats people and how they light up at the sight of her."
Last month a popular Thai television series featured Aldous in a two-part program. It drew an overwhelming response from viewers, who called in from around the country to thank Aldous for her charity works and to offer support for her projects. "Everywhere I go, people now recognise me," she says. "They come up to me and say, 'You're Susan.' They shake my hand, thank me or give me free water and yoghurt to keep me going."
Yet Aldous is not basking in her fame. She has started visiting a school for disadvantaged children to teach English and give them books, toys and sport equipment, which she collects with help from friends and grateful former proteges.
A close friend and a helpful ally at Bwang Kwang is Chavoret Jaruboon, who was Thailand's chief executioner until recently.
"The inmates call us the angel and the devil," Chavoret laughs.
Aldous, though, rejects the angel moniker and says: "I'm not a little-goody-two-shoes, or a saint. I just believe that a smile and a kind word can change lives. They've changed mine."Source: The Sun-Herald

Blood in the sand

As we stood together in Darfur’s golden sand, the stark reality hit us squarely over the head: the Sahara is rolling slowly southward. The desert is advancing, rendering access to basic resources such as land and water a matter of life or death. If you have access to those resourcesor the support of those in political power, you survive. When there is no democracy, no peaceful way of accessing power, then in Sudan, as in so many other places around the world,
people pick up guns to win back their rights.In Darfur, the government of Sudan armed that country’s far deadlier version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Janjaweed, a mixed bag of bandits and racist ideologues whose ethnic cleansing of all non-Arab people is mostly motivated by the desire to take over land and steal livestock. John has talked with young Janjaweed recruits. They felt they had no economic alternative. These were the same feelings of the young members of the militias that committed the genocide in Rwanda. Cynical leaders can exploit economic destitution and desperation, and like macabre, racist piedpipers lead people right over the moral cliff.Since achieving independence from Great Britain in 1956, Sudan has been a country at war with itself. The genocide in Darfur is only the latest in a series of horrific conflicts. Sudan’s civil wars unfold in a depressingly familiar pattern. The Khartoum government’s counterinsurgency strategy has nearly always begun with killing and displacement on a massive scale. When the international community starts to take notice and the spotlight shines on government atrocities, the regime then scales back the military assault and the chess game begins. They manipulate ethnic dynamics, sowing internal divisions within the opposition. They manipulateAmerican, European, and African diplomats, buying time through disingenuous negotiation to gain the upper hand on the battlefield. And they manipulate humanitarian assistance, hiding behind the iron curtain of state sovereignty to deny humanitarians access to territory where vulnerable civilians need help.The ruling National Islamic Front (known today as the National Congress Party) has taken state-sponsored brutality to extraordinary levels, but the systematic hoarding of wealth and power by elites in Khartoum and the endless violent campaign to silence a deprived and angry population have deep historical roots.
- Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, authors of Not on Our Watch

Love heals all that it touches

Bound to a wheelchair, missing copious amounts of his teeth, ironically the few that remain look desperately lacking, struggling to place his useless leg upon the foot piece of his all too familiar wheelchair, Dten forces a crooked smile resembling that of a stroke victim.
Dten, a southern Thai Moslem, orphaned as a young boy by a well-off family due to the mother’s hasty departure to be with her lover, still smiles. He was crippled by an accident that took four lives in his mid-twenties, yet he still smiles.
It’s hard work to smile, yet he works conscientiously to achieve this feat. He has no bathroom to relieve himself, but he still smiles as his 80-year-old adoptive grandmother collects his morning waste in a plastic bag to dispose of into the dirty slum in which they inhabit some ignoble lean-to. He smiles as he pushes his wheelchair that has been long missing the rubber to run its wheels smoothly. He smiles and concentrates as he gives it his all to push the cumbersome chair backwards for he has no strength to push it forward all in an attempt to gather some water in a cheap plastic bucket to wash with.
Widowed Granny, cloaked in the inexpensive Islamic dress of those who suffer poverty along with her elderly daughter smile also in great humility thinking nothing of looking after someone they have no obligation to help. Concerned only for his welfare after Granny dies, she prays for a way to solve their dilemma. She prays, smiles, laughs and cries secret tears.
An unassuming figure dressed in a yellow head dress notices something amongst the movement of daily life all familiar within the slum. She is trained to. She is a volunteer working alongside the dedicated staff at the Lagnu hospital in Satun—which is not a planet by the way, it so happens to be the name of the province. Here Buddhists, Muslims, highly educated doctors and uneducated peasants work side by side to make life better for the surrounding communities rife with HIV, disabilities and poverty. She spots him; she deftly secures the needed information that spurs the hospital into action.
The hospital team seek him out, surprised to discover that he has been unable to walk for five years mainly due to fear of failure, not knowing where to start and utter helplessness.
The beautiful nurses, the dedicated peasant volunteer and his ‘family’ all get behind him to work towards mobility. The slum comes out to watch.
His large framed body is a contradiction to his disability. But he must work at rebuilding his useless leg and arm; he does so amidst cheers and through pure determination for weeks on end.
Then appears a walker, he timidly looks at it, holds his breath, is forced to his feet and takes his first steps in half a decade. The community is astonished. He is jubilant.
Faith is born, he studies daily and is about to complete grade six so that he can find some time of work. While still confined to a wheelchair for the most part, he is ambulatory to a degree and he has spirit to keep on fighting.
Today, he came to the hospital where I was invited to view the local projects, inspire and share some ideas with staff and volunteers. He spoke his piece—through contorted facial expressions but ever so poignant. He said how grateful he was that he was not forgotten. He was given public recognition, media coverage, donations and clothing and last of all and
the only thing that I could offer him, a touch of love, a tight hug, a huge kiss and words of admiration for his wondrous bravery and commented on his bright handsome face.
He beamed as he came to life. “ Handsome? Me? Handsome?” His face registered quizzically and as fast as the thought came, he responded with how beautiful I was in English. We all laughed, cried and hugged. It still always amazes me how such a small deed of love can have such an incredible impact!
He is under continuous care, he will do better and not only that I contacted a large TV program here who promised to look into doing a feature on him and hopefully bring assistance to his poverty stricken conditions. After all, if anyone deserves the help, he and his family do.
It was great to be a part of many folk’s efforts to make a difference to just one important soul.
Cultural and religious gulfs were bridged in a very troubled area by love and with this miracle came new beginnings for me.
New beginnings indeed as I have been invited to assist the Hospital Accreditation Institute under the Ministry of Health with their new pilot project as a volunteer and advisor. “JIT ASAR” the name of the project means Humanized Care and that is just what this project embodies.
We will be working with a team of six accredited hospitals from every corner of Thailand combined with doctors, nurses and other health officials from the Institute. Together we will inspect and critique the “Loving Hands” projects of the six hospitals and then convene a workshop to analyze and summarize our findings. These findings will be put together in a workable format for 200 hospitals nationwide to implement.
I am very excited as I see it a great opportunity to Change the World with Love! Also it fits perfectly with another project that I am starting at The Central Chest and Lung Hospital here in Nonthaburi through teaching the staff English and visiting HIV and Cancer Patients.
Additionally, I plan to continue carrying out any other care-giving projects that frequently comes my way, as well as the weekly visits to Bang Kwang Prison and the Women’s Shelter to encourage the women, children and HIV positive patients residing there.
Love is great but don’t wait to catch it, be a carrier and pass it on to as many as possible.

- Susan Aldous, author of The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison

An empty seat

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I’d had terrible dreams weeks before the launch of my book in Bangkok. I tossed and turned as I imagined every possible thing that could go wrong like turning up at the wrong place, on the wrong date, forgetting to invite people and then to have the few guests who did come, walk out on me. Thankfully it was a pleasant relief that none of those things actually happened on the big day.
60 people attended the launch, including a former executioner, a former prisoner, prison visitors, various volunteers, media folk, friends and interested expatriates. It was a highly meaningful time with sharing some thought provoking ideas concerning penal reform and activities to make the world a better place.
Sadly there was a very important person missing from our forum and it was not due to my forgetting to invite him either. Seri served over 20-years in Bangkwang; he lives like me in Nonthaburi, where he runs his newsstand. I see him almost daily; we share a common bond as well as a joke or drink. He flirts and I dance around his invitations for a ride on his new motorbike all the while encouraging him about his new life.
He was to be one of my guests of honor, one of the ones without whom there would be no book or proof that sometimes folk do actually make it out of the Big Tiger. He accepted my invitation willingly; he too wanted to have his say. But sadly he was dying. He did not make it as he had lost one of his lungs due to cancer, most likely caused by forced labor working for years in dusty, chemically polluted factories within the prison. He was just too weak to leave his bed. I have lost him, he has not returned to his newsstand and I fear the worst.
One consolation is that the book launch was more than a promotion of my book, or even of the executioners, but it became a panel and opportunity to bring out truths and hopes for change so that folk like Seri will not have to suffer in the future. Even the high-ranking authorities attending joined us in challenging the legal system and futility of the long sentences. The organizers were pleasantly surprised by the responses and I felt that everyone left stimulated and challenged, and secretly I hope that Seri is at peace feeling pleased that he was adequately defended. The launch signaled a rallying of additional voices that will defend the likes of Seri I pray! - Susan Aldous, author of The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison

Pictures by Virginia McCrae


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