Friday, January 30, 2009

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (3. Moses 19:18 / Matthew> 19:19 ) This/It's a citation out of the Bible. It's one of the most important phrases in the Christian tradition, Jesus himself called it the "highest command". In the Bible this phrase means to simply love your human neighbours.

Here is my story: We’ve come to know our neighbour’s nature when they first moved in to the house beside us. Told us to get rid of our terrier, that one house dog we had. Selfish and inconsiderate but this I have to say was never expected! Our side of the equator was hit by stormy weathers for days and is expected to run till February. Parts of the country’s power and water supplies were disrupted. We were out of water for 4 days in total, imagine the difficulties! The department of water services didn’t take long to provide each neighbourhood with water tanks and we were wondering when they would provide us with one. Only to know when we got back from work, a water tank was placed at my neighbour’s kitchen compound and was only accessible to them. While the other side of the neighbourhood, a water tank was placed in an open space and was accessible to everyone. I saw people filling up water in their buckets. I mean seriously, to have the heart to conceal water from your neighbour and selfishly keep water where it is out of reach to people who are in need. I have no words to describe this act. From one drama to another, I don’t know how much I can take.

First it was my one dog they requested to be put away so they can let their 20 cats roam around free and poop everywhere, not to mention breeding babies in my garage. Second, they literally broke the license plates of my car into three pieces claiming the bumper of my car touched their fence. Third, they built a roof over our fence and the water runoff lands on our compound creating a waterfall effect. We had to install a water guard because they just don’t care. Forth, we’ve been dealing with the excessive noise every morning because our neighbour runs some sort of a catering service and the van will drop by their house every morning to pick up the food. We’re talking about the screams of the neighbour’s wife ordering her workers to do this and that, making it impossible for us to sleep in. Pa would always tell me, being a good neighbour involves accepting a certain level of inconvenience. But really, not everything has to be tolerated and I called up the police once in front of my neighbour to lodge a complaint. He threatened to slap me, his arm swung at the direction of my face but stopped a few inch from my face. Pa and the neighbour had a long talk afterwards, the stupid man said he couldn’t control his temper and said sorry! Pa gave him a warning and only to know when Pa returned from Jakarta, our neighbour kept a JKR water tank in his kitchen for his use and we were living with no water supply for four days! This has escalated into another bitter confrontation. I hope it’s not going to be like…Till death do us part! This I say is bad faith.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its the nature of men and their inability to control anger, temper, physical abuse. This has turned into a culture in certain parts of the world, and to be exact certain race in your part of the world.

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