She was given the nickname of Poey, meaning “plump,” because that’s what she’s been since infancy—just a little bit plump. She used to rent a room in the Tap Gaew slum for 1,000 baht a month—less than a dollar a day—until she started the fire. She didn’t start it intentionally. She accidentally left a candle burning.
Life has not been kind to Poey. Before the fire, she bought flowers and made garlands for sale at a busy neighborhood intersection. She’s thirty-seven years old and addicted to alcohol and whatever else is available to help her in her search for escape. She’s not a sex industry worker, but now and then in her most destitute times, she has been forced to find a man for money and food. Her husband had abandoned her years ago, leaving her with her son and daughter.
Her kids don’t like what their mom does. It embarrasses them to see her drunk. Since Poey is now in prison for starting the Tap Gaew fire, her daughter, aged twelve, has moved in with her grandmother. She wanted to move in with her auntie, but auntie had a new boyfriend who didn’t want complications. Poey’s teenage son is now on the streets, surviving by the day.
Her children attended our Tap Gaew kindergarten years ago. They were fun, bright kids. Poey was a pretty mom back then, before the booze got to her. Now she’s a mess and looking at a jail sentence of up to three years.
The morning after the fire, neighbors told me that the flames were heading straight for our wooden-sided tin-roof kindergarten in the slum, that it looked for sure like it would catch fire, but in the last minute, the wind changed directions. Our kindergarten was safe. It was wonderful, they said—almost a miracle.
I told them that it would have been far more wonderful and even more nearly miraculous had the school burned down and the houses been saved. It is much easier to replace a slum kindergarten than to rebuild thirty-one slum houses. Besides, in those thirty-one slum homes lived 103 families, most of them renting tiny, single rooms.
Poey used to own her own house, but mortgaged it about four years ago for booze and never paid it back. That’s when she lost her children, too. True, they still lived with her, but the love and caring was gone. Her daughter began spending more time at her auntie’s home where they had a TV and food was more plentiful.
Besides making garlands of flowers, Poey is a bag lady. That’s actually her main occupation—sifting through piles of junk for plastic or aluminum beer cans, anything that she can sell for more booze to get through each night.
Recently, Poey had a new man—a shack-mate—but he’s doing time now for drug possession. He was caught with a pocketful of amphetamines, the current drug of choice, and couldn’t come up with the “exchange money,” as it’s called, for the arresting officer.
The fire started on a Wednesday night. Poey had been drinking her supper by candle light in her three-square-meter room. The shack’s owner was charging fifty baht per light bulb, 200 baht per clothes iron, and 100 baht per rice cooker every month. Water was an additional fifty baht for each person living in the room.
Poey hadn’t been paying her rent for three months before the fire. As a longtime resident of the slum, the landlord was patient and waited, hoping she’d pull herself together. But he did cut her utilities, both water and electric. Slum electricity and water prices are at least double the price of an ordinary meter price—what the rest of Bangkok pays.
Getting water was easy at just a few baht a bucket. But for Poey to see inside her room in the evening, she had to use candles. And without a fan, it was blistering hot under her mosquito net. The TV had been sold years ago. (Actually, there are many renters in the Tap Gaew slum too poor to own a TV, and by Bangkok standards, that’s quite poor.) If you don’t have a TV, it means that you’re not “making it.”
Poey had not been making it for a long time by then. I want everyone to know that Poey is very likeable and well known in her slum as a good person. She has always been kind and generous, sharing everything she has and giving it away to neighbors in trouble.
The house where the fire started sat on stilts in the middle of the slum. The interior was divided into tiny rooms, one per family, with the plumbing and a squat toilet outdoors. Folks wash their clothes outdoors too, and hang them to dry on clotheslines along the wooden catwalks between the homes. Nobody steals anyone’s clothes or much else here.
Tap Gaew is an honest slum full of good people. It’s the kind of slum you’d want to live in if you had to. Before the fire, Tap Gaew comprised 197 houses compressed into a single, narrow ribbon configuration under the expressway. One side faces railway land, while the other side faces a swamp four meters deep, with a few fish, frogs and turtles.
Poey fell asleep drunk on the night of the fire while her candle lit the mosquito net and started the blaze.
The fire lasted less than an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, which is all the time it takes with a light breeze to burn down thirty-one houses in an area just 150 meters long and thirty meters wide.
It takes just two minutes, maybe three at most. When you live in a Bangkok slum in a wooden shack, that’s the “grace period” you have to douse a fire. After that, the fire goes out of control. A few buckets of water and fire extinguishers can do little to stop it.
Fifteen minutes had passed before the fire engines arrived, followed by more precious time lost while the municipal authorities turned off the electricity in the neighborhood. (Fire hoses pointing at 220 volt electrical wires are a sure disaster.)
The volunteer firefighters were delayed too, because they first had to rescue residents while trying to extinguish flames. When the electricity was turned off, pandemonium followed. People began running in the darkness for their lives, carrying children and crippled old people to safety and then running back to carry on their backs whatever they could salvage from their burning houses. Everyone in the community was dashing around on these crowded and rickety one-meter-wide catwalks. It looked like an apocalypse—a hellish vision of chaos and destruction.
As soon as they could, the local volunteer force began to crank up a portable pump that sprayed water from the swamp onto the fire. A few minutes later, the fire engines were set on the expressway above the slum. From that vantage point, they were able to extinguish the flames below quickly. Together, they were able to save over 150 houses in the slum, preventing a far worse disaster.
Slum people live in tremendous fear of fires. They are always on the alert, always watchful, and most fires are put out in time.
Fires start small—from one lit candle or a forgotten pot on a gas burner, sometimes from the cooking grease that’s been splattering onto a dry wooden wall for years. Rarely are slum fires started by children playing with matches. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a very destitute person, usually among the poorest of the poor, who unwittingly ignites the fire, afflicting great pain, sorrow and destruction upon close friends and neighbors.
There’s a slum adage: To be robbed ten times is never as bad as one flood; to be flooded out ten times is never as bad as one fire.
It was Poey’s first fire. She hadn’t yet moved to Tap Gaew when they had a previous fire ten years earlier. Before she was arrested, she was in tears over a lost family photo taken when her children were young. The photo reminded her of happier days, halcyon days, beautiful memories of a slum person’s Camelot.
The Tap Gaew community has already rebuilt new homes—temporary ones. The residents are still squatters without legal rights of ownership or lease but fortunately, the land they call home is not commercially valuable at this moment.
The fire has set the Tap Gaew community back, maybe for years, but it’s a community with inner strength, filled with families who aspire to make a better slum—like a real Mom and Pop slum, the kind with a couple of paved roads and lots of stores.
How they were able to rebuild will be a story for another day.