"I believe every life has a purpose"...Compassion has been "my drug of choice"

[dajoki]

'Angel' makes a career in kindness at the 'Bangkok Hilton' prison
Susan Aldous is a friend of inmates and guards alike.
By Tibor Krausz | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the March 10, 2008 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0310/p20s01-wosc.html

<<snip>>

For over a decade, Susan Aldous has been coming to Bang Kwang, as the maximum security prison is officially known, several days a week to make good a promise to herself "to turn this place around by getting a smile out of every guard and prisoner.

"It's working, you see!" she beams.

But smiles are the least of it. The Australian woman's humanitarian mission is deeper than that, bringing a shaft of light – a bit of humanity – into dark, forgotten corners. The prison is just one of them. For two decades, the unaffiliated, unpaid volunteer has been a constant presence at Bangkok women's shelters, hospital wards, slums, and upcountry orphanages, tending to the needy, the abandoned, and the despondent – men, women, young, and old.

<<snip>>

"In between," Aldous says, "I try to do my laundry and brush my teeth."

She's a single mother with no income other than small donations from strangers, friends, and the relatives of prisoners to pay for her $120-a-month apartment that she shares with 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, she adds, "What do I need? I'm 31 years down the road with this , but I haven't yet missed a meal." (Though she's come close.)

Her goodwill has earned Aldous the epithet "Angel of Bang Kwang" among prisoners – which she dislikes. "I'm not a Little Goody Two-Shoes, or a saint," she insists. "But I believe every life has a purpose, and that I can be a link in a chain of events that may help improve lives – one life at a time with the one life I have to give."


<<snip>>

Once, Aldous herself might have been a resident here. Raised by foster parents in an upper-middle-class enclave of Melbourne, Australia, she describes herself in childhood as a menace, "jamming pins into kids' butts" and terrorizing classmates. By her teens, in the 1970s, she'd dropped out of school and was, by turns, a spaced-out flower child (like "Mary Poppins on crack," she says); a hell-raising skinhead biker in military fatigues; and a protopunk with tattoos, safety-pin piercings, and shaved eyebrows.

Not yet 17, she was nicknamed "Petrol Head" for her gas, glue, and aerosol sniffing habits. She'd throw tantrums and slash herself with razor blades, she says. "I was angry at the world and rebelled at a predictable life in the suburbs."

<<snip>>

Compassion has been "my drug of choice" ever since, she says of her born-again experience.

[IndyOp]

1. Wow. The Dalai Lama visited my town last year. As always, vendors appear

to sell stuff. I bought a bumper sticker that said, "Compassion is the new radicalism" and put it in my bag, but when I looked for it later it was missing. Nothing else in my bag was disturbed so I figure it must've fallen out. In any case, I figure someone else needed it. But I was sorry to lose it.

:hi: