I was walking alone in the dark and narrow street of Jakarta. A hot warm hazelnut latte in my hand. Shouldn’t have put more sugar in that. Already sweet. Gotta remember that.
Like I am going to be here that often.
And then the bang woke me up from the thought. Few kids on the street threw fire cracker toward one another. Just like it could become a regular street toy for those 8 years old children.
And suddenly I realised i’m alone in this unfamiliar darkness in a very unfamiliar place. Few dozen of teenager on motorcycles roaring the street with smoke. They kept their distance, of cause. And I kept my pace.
And then my thought fell into the idea for the purpose of life. Earlier I talked to my girlfriend on the phone about thing she was doing today, saving some stray dog lives in Nakorn Phanom, northeastern of Thailand. Dogs were recruit during the raid of illegal trade of this heard of 2,000, as the purpose to sell them to the butcher’s market in neighboring countries. Now they were kept barely alive due to the lower capacity of bureaucratic system. During only a day or two that she and her friends went there to help organising things, situation may improve gradually. You can’t change the system overnight, of cause. But it has been better than sitting somewhere, still, and do the talking.
She told me about this group of NGO’s people who arrived late after the news spread out that the funding from donation arrive at 15 million baht in total. Of cause, they don’t show there attitude to help, or even gave any suggestion on how the dogs should be helped: only keep asking for their share from the sum of the donation. So this is what NGO does, doesn’t it? This is the purpose of Non Government Organisation.
So the funding arrived. But still until before her team arrived, the money could not be used. That is also the purpose of governmental bureaucratic organisation: To make everything harder and slower that it may need to. Perhaps we are too much afraid of corruption and we can compromise few death to maintain the vague safety of the society from corruption. So few lives could be lost while the corruption is still there. This does not sound like a good purpose to me.
The last thing is about the purpose of few people who want to change some small thing, like a aspect of dog lives. A purpose of giving the love out to those who may need it most. Some of those dogs were even indeed stolen from their owner. Love were taken from them in all sudden. And those dogs are lost and brutally damage: physically and mentally. Her purpose is simple: do whatever they can just to help. And she just do it and few help will follow her path. One person and one week can raise up to 100,000 baht to help. It is not the amount of money that count but the deliberate purpose does: a change by a person that lead to something new.
There no clear purpose of my thought, though. It just came out naturally. I was still walking in this unfamiliar darkness with the cup of hot coffee in my hand. My immediate purpose will be going back to the hotel room, having this cup of coffee and start another round of working. We all have different purpose for good reason or none. It does not really matter, in fact.
I just know that life must have a purpose. Should there be no purpose, there would be no life.
