Hat Yai, Thailand

We stopped at traffic lights in Hat Yai, a bustling city just over the border from Malaysia. On the curbside a young man was making brightly coloured spiders, in differing sizes, from wire, strips of brightly dyed rags and cotton. I had been watching him for a minute or two before I realised that he was part of a larger economic community. An older women, his mother perhaps, was squatting by the side of his arachnid covered tarpaulin, alternatively feeding herself and a quadriplegic man lying on a porter’s baggage trolley. At the other side, another man was busking, playing a tune on the wires strung over a wooden box, a blue plastic bucket at his fee. All around them life was just going on. People passed, some stopped and dropped coins into the bucket, or passed them to the mother. Just part of a regular routine.