A different kind of canal living

We’ve now moved into our new home in a K-town slum! Our family’s been on a journey of downward mobility for a while now, and it is good finally to be here, living with the poor.

A few years ago, during my ‘past life’ as an engineer, the company I was with sent me interstate for a 9 month stint on a project I was working on. One of the perks was that they put my wife and I up in a very nice, 3 storey villa with its own private jetty on this canal.


I must admit, living there for a while was pretty sweet. We could drop a couple of crab pots off our jetty and enjoy fresh crabs for dinner. There was a beautiful and scarcely used beach about 3 minutes walk around the corner. For these 9 months we lived in the playground of the rich. The wealth and man-made beauty in this place, built exclusively for the leisure of the rich, was incredible.

Now, 5 years later we find ourselves again with canal front property.


But this time our canal has been built not for the leisure of the rich. It’s their industrial toilet. Throughout the day the water can go from black to deep purple, blue or green depending on what is being dumped by the factories upstream. At least a couple of times a day huge cakes of foam made of who knows what float down. The banks have been claimed not for exclusive getaways, but by the poor. They have made their homes on the marginal land useful for nothing else. Sometimes our neighbours refer to it as the ‘canal’, other times as simply the ‘drain’. We’re currently in monsoon season and just this week a flood brought this lovely concoction right into the homes of many of our neighbours.

Our canal also carries all the garbage and sewerage from our community as well as others in the area, since there are no organised systems to serve these communities. This is the case even though there’s a sewerage treatment plant and local dump both within about 10 minutes walk. But these do not exist to serve communities such as ours.

The contrast between the playgrounds of the rich and the dwelling places of the poor should not sit lightly with us. Surely these things should prompt us to ask some deep and sobering questions about things like justice in this world, how God feels about it all, and the response he calls us to.

Finally, there’s one more canal I’ve been thinking about recently;

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (Rev 22:1-2)

What an amazing new creation we have to look forward to. And what a beautiful contrast God’s river of life is to both the canals of the rich and the poor. He doesn’t create it just to serve himself. And instead of carrying all manner of waste and dealing sickness to the poor, God’s river is a carrier of life, a grace from him of healing to the hurting. My prayer is for the life giving river of God to flow amongst us, bringing healing to the many forms of brokenness present both in the slums of K-town, and us all.