I smell a lot of Western elitism in this thread. If DWB is happy where he is, then everyone else shouldn't give him shit for deciding to live there. Any well travelled person will know that the world is an incredibly diverse place in which people live in vastly disparate conditions, and that "poor" does not always equal "terrible to live there".
When I was in Peru, I was surrounded by people who were amazingly poor, by our standards. Those same people happened to be the kindest, most wonderful people I have ever had the privelage of spending time with. Furthermore, they were humble and not totally enslaved by ambition for fortune like so many of us are, which made their lives much less stressful, and allowed them to focus on family and matters of the self much more.
That said, I'm sure there are many wonderful things about living in Thailand, or most any other country for that matter, and I wouldn't let the fact that a country has shitty neighborhoods (god knows the US has plenty too) deter one from appreciating all the culturally rich benefits that living abroad can have.
