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Photo taken in an orphanage/AIDS hospice/preschool in slums of Bangkok. The Mercy Centre is run by a slum Catholic priest named Father Joe Maier.
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© 2007 Wiley Books
Photo of a rock garden playground at an AIDS orphanage/hospice/preschool in slums of Bangkok. The following is true:
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The chorus that christens the morning begins sharply at seven o'clock. Its crescendo rises softly in a child's soprano, then quickens into a staccato that flits like wind chimes through the slum priest's windows and the entire Mercy courtyard. Nothing about it is orchestrated. You couldn't if you wanted.
"Does a rock have life?" he asked me one day.
Silly question.
"Do rocks make noise?"
Sure, if you throw them against something.
Outside his house is a preschool playground with no swings, slides or ropes to climb, just beige sand and giant boulders, plenty of both. When Mercy constructed it from donated materials, the staff envisioned an aesthetic touch to the school yard. A rock garden, it's called. Then the preschoolers saw it and took off their shoes. They burrowed their toes into the sand and hopped from boulder to boulder, as if a creek gurgled underfoot. They patted and stroked the rough granite, pampered it like a pet, then marched around it smiling, laughing, joking. Turns out rocks and sand are good for more than their looks. The children were cut loose, told to go wild.
And that's when the Mercy morning received its gleeful accompaniment.
One of the kids told the priest that if one boulder is touched or climbed on then every boulder must be touched or climbed on. Seems all the preschoolers know this rule. You don't leave even one rock out, feelings get hurt that way. The priest shook his head at the obvious wisdom.
"Neither you nor I would ever think we could offend a rock, but actually it is a very (spiritual) concept, very cosmic, that all creation has life," he says. "So … does a rock have life?"
It can enrich it, I guess. Who knew? But left alone it's still just rock, and like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, maybe no one hears it, sees it or cares. That's where I figure he's headed: the Buddhist philosophy of interdependency. Everything affects everything else. Life does not exist in isolation. We receive by giving and vice versa. It's why Father Joe calls it a privilege for abused/orphaned/sick children to allow him to serve them. Their trust is electric.
"Yes, a rock is a form of life," he says finally. "Not one of the higher forms."
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
Excerpted from © 2007 THE GOSPEL OF FATHER JOE: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
One of seven graduations in preschools built illegally on squatter land in Thailand.
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God is not something out there, the slum priest had admonished me many times, and all the way to the end of my visits he would continue to do so, gesturing toward the sky or downtown's crazed congestion, repeating it long after I no longer needed convincing.
God is in our selfless action, in the acts of doing and giving and caring, in the smiles and in the laughter and in the kneeling, eye-level comfort. He/She is in the thoughts and words and movements of our everyday, in our friendships, in our families and in our friendships that feel like family.
And God is always found in the soprano voices and free thoughts of small children. He/She is there. We only have to listen.
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
"So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."
P.S. This is details of the rock formation in my last photo. We saw these rocks on our hike to and from Landscape Arch in Arches National Park.
Fr. Joe's shack in 1983. To know the poor you have to live with them. So he did. For thirty-three years.
Photo copyright / Jim Coyne
The following is excerpted from The Gospel of Father Joe:
SETUP: The year is 2000 and Father Joe has taken me to his "neighborhood" and shanty home for the first time
Beyond the parking lot's suffocating smell of diesel and as far as I could see was a slum held aloft on crisscrossing catwalks. Stilts of wood stuck into the muck of a dung-brown canal colored by nature, life, and a city sewage pump. Hundreds of family homes, each smaller than my two-room Banyan Tree suite, sat four feet or so above a soupy mix, give or take twelve inches, depending on the tide of the Chao Phraya River and the day's emissions from a Bangkok Municipal Authority pumping station No. 14.
A few of the more feeble homes leaned into neighbors, like buddies staggering home from a tavern, and at every curve of the catwalks, dense pockets of odor waited, some vaguely different but all sour. At one point, the stench was so strong that we stopped in our tracks, walked to the edge of the catwalk, and stared down.
I jerked reflexively, pulled my shirt over my nose, then lowered it just as quickly. I hoped he hadn't seen. Evidently he had. "Yeah," Father Joe said. "That's a battle I've lost."
Standing on the water was a pile of rubbish as high as raked leaves. Cans, bottles, wrappers, dirty diapers, spoiled food, and various other things I couldn't identify or see clearly in the murky water and evening's shadows. But in the boil of that evening, I could taste them. I wanted to spit.
As we watched, a milky oblong bubble of methane, as large as a head of cauliflower, gurgled to the surface along the edge of one pile. It jiggled like gelatin, then popped.
Daaamn! I couldn't help it; the curse slipped out.
This was Father Joe's neighborhood. His home was two hard turns away and on the left. Had I known, I would've shown more restraint.
Damn, I thought but didn't let slip two minutes later when he stood outside a door and fiddled with a lock and key.
Yours?
He waved me in. From where I stood two feet inside, it looked tidier and sturdier than the others, but it was still a wood-and-tin shack. It had two rooms and a floor made lopsided from the uneven settling of catwalk stilts. He had a single bed, a small TV, and in a corner of the first room, one of those Abdominizer sit-up gadgets.
The "house," as he called it, was proof of evolution. It was several rungs up from other Slaughterhouse shacks where he'd lived.
"Top of the food chain," he said with a straight face.
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For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
obviously you'll want to view it on black
yesterday we drove over to loutraki, a seaside town about an hour's drive away from athens -- people were enjoying the last remnants of their easter vacation strolling across the length of the beach (some dipped in), having a lazy coffee and a few (like me) taking pictures.
the beach is pebbly, the water is cold and clear, and the dominant color is blue -- until the sun bids goodnight.
'if we revere the golden rule, why is it so rare in the games we teach our children? '
-from the rules of the game by carl sagan
i've placed this picture on the map.
(because i was asked: this is SOOC with a change of heart on the white balance -- i used shade white balance on the RAW file... however, i'm not a purist -- i have no problem with 'shopping' the daylights out of an image -- i just didn't do it here.)
on the blog: toomanytribbles.blogspot.com/2009/04/gold.html
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This maxim, known as “the golden rule” of ethics, is sometimes portrayed as an exclusively Christian concept. But it can be found in different guises in all world religions, as well as secular teaching.
What follows is a note about the cover from the publisher:
The Buddhists say, “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.” The apostle Matthew wrote, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” In the Jewish Talmud we find, “What is hurtful to yourself, do not to your fellow man.” And in the Hindu Mahabharata – “Do naught to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain.” A fitting message for Easter and the Passover. Likewise fitting is that Norman Rockwell recently was cited by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for “dedication to the highest ideals of amity, understanding and co-operation among all men; and for artistic leadership in depicting with exacting technique and unfailing humor the universal fact that all men, great and unknown, are members of One Family of Man under God.”
I’ve done it myself. I’ve ridiculed a person in authority. Based on these verses, and the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12 (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”) such behavior is wrong. We aren’t certain about the time when Peter wrote, telling his readers to “Honor the King.” (Some translations say “Honor the Emperor.”) But, no matter which king or emperor he had in mind, he wasn’t talking about a political authority who was friendly to Christians. Some Roman Caesars expected to be worshiped as if they were gods. They presided over an occupied Israel. Roman soldiers had officiated at the crucifixion of Jesus. Some of the Caesars had Christians executed in various humiliating and painful ways. Some of them forced Christians to worship in secret. These were not nice people. Yet Peter said to honor and respect them. So did Paul.
Jesus said, in Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount, that we shouldn’t call other people fools, or equivalent words, and there may be a punishment, the most serious one, if we disobey this, even for government authorities.
Must we always agree with the President, Congress, the Supreme Court, the mayor, or the school board? No, but they should be respected, not mocked. Sermon over. Thanks for reading.
I really like this beautiful message and added it to one of my photos. This world needs more human kindness.
In the Klong Toey slums of Bangkok en route to a preschool graduation
Excerpted from my book, THE GOSPEL OF FATHER JOE>: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
Christ never said there wouldn’t be suffering, but all of life is not suffering, as formal Buddhism teaches, Father Joe explained. “We have this tendency in us to goof off, and we have a tendency in us to do really dumb things—in some of us, that tendency gets really strong. But life is not about suffering. Jesus came along and said, I will give you a way of thinking and a way of acting and a set of ethics, and if you live this way, yes, shit is going to happen, but you will basically be happy. If you live this way, act this way, treat people
this way, it will all be OK.”
Five centuries before Christ, the Buddha taught that nirvana — blissful emancipation from the carnal desires and attachments that lock humankind to perpetual suffering and rebirth —is found only through a learned, diligent mind and a compassionate heart. It’s the same basic lesson that ran through Christ’s teachings, and Muhammad, who showed up about five centuries after Christ, said many of the same things. Renounce material gain and selfish comfort in favor of selfless action.
All three — the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, in that order and historical symmetry —warned of the cravings that blind and bind humankind to ignorance, greed, lust, jealousy, anger, apathy, fear, hatred, and so on. It’s the poison pumping through the veins of narcissism. Or as the pastors of my youth might call it, Satan’s side of the street. The Buddha didn’t discuss goodness and evil in the scare-the-devil-out-of-you way of a Southern Baptist, but he spoke of the Truth, or Dharma, as a spiritual awakening ushering us into eternal peace.
It seemed to me that our differences were semantic. At the very least, this nirvana stuff must be close kin to the paradise promised by the Christian resurrection.
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If interested, you may download Chapter 1 on publisher's website HERE
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
“The Golden Rule is the peace boat that four Quacker activists sailed in 1958toward the Marshall Islands in an attempt to halt atmospheric nucclear weapons testing. She nows sails for peace, a nuclear-free world and a sustasinable environment. “ www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org
I have some pens and pencils.
A sketchbook.
And a head full of quotes, lyrics and the like.
Come and see them at www.Quoteskine.co.uk
Don't forget to buy the book!
THE GOSPEL OF FATHER JOE: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok by Greg Barrett (Jossey-Bass/Wiley Books, 336 pages, April 1, 2008).
At an orphanage/AIDS hospice/preschool in slums of Klong Toey, Bangkok, Thailand.
NOTE: Yes, this is a longer than usual unedited rough excerpt. Sorry. But if you stick with it you might see the face of God at the end. Or Satan. Just thought I should say that.
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EXCERPTED from © 2008 The Gospel of Father Joe
"You think I have angst?" Father Joe asked me one day when I described my first impressions of his temperament.
Oh boy, yes, off the charts.
He looked insulted. Thai Buddhists preach "jai yen." A "cool heart" is cool.
Of course I didn't mean it as an insult. It was just an uninformed observation best kept to myself. He stared at me and nodded like he was chewing on the idea for the first time.
"Yes, yes, maybe it is angst. … Maybe I have angst."
He spit the word. Clearly I was missing something; any suburbanite flying coach from halfway around the world could easily miss something in the squatter slums of Bangkok. Blink and you miss it. Stare and you miss it, too. I think that's what he was thinking.
Father Joe's office is not a stationary thing and he will sometimes invite me along during morning jaunts through his Mercy Centre; offices, orphanages, AIDS hospice, preschool classes. There's a sharper focus in the morning's soft light. Without visitors and all of the outside distractions, it's just the Mercy family.
So at precisely 8:07 a.m. on a Wednesday, not long after my "angst" faux pas, he said to me, "C'mon, let's walk."
It was spoken like an order and I knew not to blink or stare or hesitate or to think too much. Just follow. In my notebook that morning I would scribble the following while rushing to stay on the heels of the village don:
8:10 a.m. Immediately outside Father Joe's door is Dominick; a young Canadian sweeping a Mercy sidewalk. It's an odd sight. A six-foot-tall, slightly slouched, unshaven white guy with a broom … in Bangkok's largest slum. A migrant worker from Quebec, he picks fruit in North America until he saves enough money to travel to Bangkok. Here he parties hard with the locals; drugs, sex and more sex, Father Joe says. During one of those parties he impregnated a local woman, the older sister of one of Mercy's brightest orphans; a teenage girl on a prep school scholarship abroad.
Dominick's baby girl is three months old now. Father Joe is trying to keep Dominick close until he secures a passport for the girl from Thailand's Canadian embassy. Such documents are priceless in the developing world, Father Joe explains. A North American passport could someday be the girl's gateway to a better life.
But obtaining a foreign passport in Thailand is tricky stuff; the Canadian embassy requires plenty of paperwork, blood work and the unflagging focus of coherent parents, neither of whom appeared suited to the task. Father Joe worries that any day Dominick could disappear again into the apple orchards of a faraway land. So he plies him with daily encouragement and Mercy's part-time employment. The broom is a leash.
You're keeping him close because you want to make sure he gets the passport while his daughter is still young? I ask.
"No, no. I want him to get that passport before he dies. He's as unsteady as the wind."
8:18 a.m. An older Thai woman, weathered and bent like a question mark, is spraying the Mercy sidewalk with a garden hose. She's a slum grandmother and primary support of four mentally handicapped children placed in her charge. Mercy helps support her with odd jobs and occasional handouts.
"Great lady," Father Joe says, nodding good morning. "She waters the sidewalk. Waters the sand. Waters the rocks. She sweeps the grass until it dies. …But, really, a wonderful, wonderful lady."
8:22 a.m. A member of the Mercy staff approaches in tears. I recognize her. When I was here eight months earlier she had interviewed for a job at Mercy. She was all smiles that day. Long story short, she's a recovering drug addict, rehabbed on her own, has been clean for several years. A gritty local, Father Joe calls her. She's the type Mercy likes to hire. The day Mercy offered her a job I had been a fly on the wall. She had looked like she would float out of the room. Now she looks so shaken I hardly recognized her.
Her voice trembles when she explains to Father Joe how she discovered the night before that her twenty-eight-year-old brother is raping her fourteen-year-old daughter. Four times he's raped her. After an urgent huddle with the woman, some of her family and a couple of Mercy's staff, Father Joe explains to me that the brother's wife left a few weeks or months ago and the brother is shrugging off the assaults as a logical consequence.
"Well … my wife was gone," the brother told the sister.
The brother's grandmother, mother and two sisters are reluctant to have him arrested. Just the thought of Bangkok's stark, overcrowded, tuberculosis-infected Bang Kwang Prison gives everyone shudders. And, as Grandmom said, the boy promised he would never rape her again. That's good enough for us, she says.
Hearing this Father Joe loses his jai yen. If the brother remains free the girl must move into Mercy. Immediately and indefinitely, Father Joe demands. These things don't heal themselves, he tells the girl's mother. The brother will rape her fourteen-year-old again.
The mother looks confused.
When the grandmother resists this order and says the family will work things out without the interference of a slum priest, Father Joe tells her that she is dead to him. He promises he will not even attend her funeral.
It's that day — today — that the girl will move into Mercy.
At 8:47 a.m., Father Joe explains to me: "The brother has raped not only his niece, he has raped his whole family. His older sister, his younger sister, his mother, his niece, even his grandmother. He didn't put is pee-pee in them all, but he raped them. This shit tears the whole family apart. It is the ultimate act of violence. …That girl can never ever go back to her village as long as he is on the streets. She will never feel safe."
We walk on in silence.
8:51 a.m. A blind woman with AIDS and a nine-year-old girl re-learning how to walk are holding onto one another, linked together with a volunteer and taking baby steps around the Mercy Centre courtyard. This stops us in our tracks.
"Look at that, just look at that," Father Joe says triumphantly, and his mood lifts.
The girl, Fon, is a newcomer. After receiving a tip about a case of child neglect, Mercy social workers had found her locked in a room in her slum flat. She is mentally retarded with the IQ of a two-year-old. Her mother works days; sometimes from morning until evening. She never could afford a caregiver. Instead she locked her daughter in a small room.
"Slum budgeting," a staff member says to me.
"Cruelty for the sake of economics," another says.
No one at Mercy seems to know for sure how long that room served as Fon's daycare. Perhaps years. By the time the staff found her she was a spill on the floor. Now she must learn how to walk again. She toddles slow laps around Mercy and brakes for every scent, like it's all new. Every sound turns her head, every touch is explored like it's braille. And every climb of every step is a success celebrated. She'll smile and raise her arms in victory.
When Fon arrived a month ago she hit her funny bone on a desk and her reflexes were so eroded she grabbed her elbow in slow motion. Her cry sounded like a loud yawn. The other day in Mercy's crowded chapel the children waved small paper fans in the heat and one accidentally struck Fon in an eye. She reached up quickly and yelped loudly. Everyone smiled.
At the moment, circling the courtyard, her hand is in Tatasanee's, a blind, middle-aged woman in the late stages of AIDS. The last time I saw Tatasanee she was wearing adult diapers, a white T-shirt and she sat up all night in the adult hospice, rocking back and forth in her bed. She kept repeating, I want to die, I want to die.
When volunteer nuns and nurses from Belfast and Dublin tried to befriend her, she responded sternly, "Go away," in perfect English gleaned from working years ago in a touristy strip bar. One of the Irish ladies had returned with a wheelchair and proceeded to gung-ho prod her to get out of bed and go for a stroll. "Go away!" Tatasanee repeated, louder.
The next day I had watched as Father Joe sat on the bed directly in front of her. He spoke in Thai, gently at first. "Go away," I heard her say. Then, in Thai, "Leave me alone and let me die." She blamed karma for her AIDS; she just wanted to skip ahead to the next life, a healthy body, anything but this.
At that, the patience in Father Joe's voice had left. "I'm tired of this shit," he snapped. "Who do you think you are? You have no right to die. You don't have that kind of control over life. I took you into my house and this is how you act? … If I have to drag you, drag you, you're getting out of bed."
Tough love.
Now, several months later, here is Tatasanee. She is dressed in a festive sarong skirt and a lime-green soccer jersey. The name of an Irish team is emblazoned on it. During the meandering lap she grins softly, taking each step like a baby step, hand-in-hand with Fon.
"Wow," I say.
"Yes. Wow," Father Joe says.
8:56 a.m. Staff members give Father Joe an update on another rape. This case has consumed the senior staff for a month. A ten-year-old slum girl was assaulted by a neighbor who might or might not be a distant relative. In order to pry open her legs the man punched the girl in the chest until she began to bleed internally. Then he raped her. The girl ended up in a local hospital and was the crime's only witness.
Father Joe had feared she might be murdered, silenced. He knew a police officer who was visiting his sick wife daily at the hospital, so he paid the officer to stay late every night to keep an eye on the girl's room. Then to expedite the man's arrest, Mercy bribed a police clerk with a bottle of whiskey. An arrest warrant was issued two days after the assault rather than the usual two weeks or two months. When the man's bail was set low enough for him to free himself, Mercy had made an appeal in the judge's chambers and the bail was quadrupled. Father Joe isn't sure, but he suspects a bottle of whiskey was used in those negotiations as well.
"It's something you do after the judge has agreed to help, not before. It would be in bad taste to pull it out before," he explains.
Today, the girl is recovering safely in the hospital, studying for her school finals, the staff reports. The rapist is in jail, a universally torturous place for child rapists.
That is the update that concludes our walk at 9:06 a.m. Father Joe smiles.
At 9:07 a.m., Father Joe says to me, "It works doesn't it?"
He's referring to life's precarious system of checks and balances, the way good damps down bad, the way yin is kept in check by yang and vice versa. Without balance a village of the broken would just be a broken village.
In this way we all reside to varying degrees in the balance that's visible in the morning light of Mercy. Selfless and selfish. Confident and fearful. Love and hate. Knowledge and ignorance. Competing energies causing cascades of consequences, one into the other. Without light we'd know only darkness. Without goodness we'd know only wickedness. Without illness we'd never recognize health.
How do you know? I had asked Father Joe.
It's the question I fumble every time it's asked of me.
How do you know of God or Allah or the Almighty Whatever? How do you even know that there is any sort of benevolent energy?
At precisely 9:15 on that Wednesday morning, Father Joe answered the question for me definitively. He didn't realize it at the time. In his mind he replayed the brutal rape of that ten-year-old girl and his mind's eye watched a grown man climb on top of a frightened child and strike-strike-strike down on her until her guts bled and her legs parted.
"That!" Father Joe barked, "is Evil."
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
Photo © John Padorr 2008
Excerpt from my nonfiction book about an orphange/preschool/AIDS hospice built illegally in the squatter slums of Bangkok. Among other things, it cares for and educates children infected in utero with AIDS. It's run by a defiant Catholic priest named Father Joe. Most notable about the place are the children -- they laugh and skip and smile and play, as though they were infected with something magnanimous.
© 2008 The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
For my last ten days in the slums of Bangkok in March 2007, I moved from the nearby hotel—across the street from the Klong Toey Starbucks—onto the Mercy campus. There was a vacant room upstairs near the orphanage on the main campus, but Father Joe didn’t exactly invite me to stay there.
“Pack your bags and get over here. Now.” he barked, phoning me at the hotel.
I canceled my reservation and moved immediately into the Shire.
Having made three visits since 2000, I thought I’d seen about all there was to see at Mercy: children studying, children skipping, children laughing, children crying, children emaciated and dying.
But no sooner had the sun set on my first day in 2007 than I began to hear a strain of voices that sounded slightly different, coming from a corridor near my door. I poked my head out and saw no one. It was a pleasantly warm evening fanned by a breeze. I inhaled the night air, retreated inside, and resumed reading. Immediately, I heard it again, fainter, as if it were on the move. I closed the book and took off exploring, more curious than anything.
In the dark as in the dawn, the half-block-long Mercy campus is mostly quiet and feels larger but more intimate. I strolled through webs of shadows cast by fluorescent light, around darkened corners, down flights of stairs, and around the tropical courtyard
anchored by a five-hundred-pound bronze statue of the Virgin Mary. Then I heard it again: a piercing shriek from upstairs.
I walked up the concrete ramp leading from the ground floor to the mezzanine cafeteria, not in a rush, just needing to see. And as I reached the top, they got me.
“Jah-aye! Jah-aye!”
A quartet of kids from the AIDS brigade jumped out and startled me. In the darkness of a Mercy night, they were playing hide and seek, shouting boo and gotcha, or the Thai equivalent, then darting down corridors with the same kind of zeal that had characterized the spring evenings of my own privileged childhood. As warm weather blossomed and summer vacation beckoned, we kids could catch lightning in a jar. Barefoot on the cool blades of our freshly cut lawn, my sister and I and others would play in night’s sky with Mason jars long emptied of canned okra and pickled beets,
catching, releasing, and catching again the year’s first lightning bugs.
Now, as my shadow beat me to the end of a lighted corridor, I was reminded of that magic and the spell nightfall could cast. Mercy’s children jumped from the corners in choruses of gleeful gotchas and then convulsed in laughter. Just as quickly, they disappeared.
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If interested, you may download Chapter 1 on publisher's website HERE
or search inside the book on AMAZON
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
Photo copyright and permission by Carlos Oñate
For Literary Reference group:
The following is excerpted from Greg Barrett's (me) book The Gospel of Father Joe.
In 1979, at the age of thirty-eight, Father Joe begged off (“literally begged,” he says) from noon prayers at Bangkok’s Holy Redeemer Church. He would recite prayers, of course, but could he please say them at the Asian Institute of Technology? It was an
hour’s drive north of Bangkok in normal traffic—which always meant bottleneck—but it offered a top-rate graduate program in human settlements and urban development.
Or, as Father Joe interpreted it, in “how to really, really make a difference.”
As a Redemptorist, he told his bosses, he must return to school. It was a moral imperative. That’s how he explained it in written requests, in face-to-face meetings, and eventually, in shouted expletives to church superiors in Thailand and at Bangkok’s Holy Redeemer Hall, the apartment dorm where he’d lived when he was pushed into the Slaughterhouse slums.
He reminded them of their founding saint, Alphonsus Liguori, and his charge to Redemptorists to help the world’s “desperately poor and most-abandoned people.” These were those people, Father Joe told the church. Let him learn how to help, really help.
“I made a promise to the children of the Slaughterhouse, to the peoples of Klong Toey, to educate their children and to walk with them in honor. To uphold the dignity of a holy place called Klong Toey,” Father Joe explained to me now, in 2006, pulling from the scene in the 1994 thriller Clear and Present Danger, where James Earl Jones’s character explains to Harrison Ford’s character, a CIA deputy director, that his first obligation is to the American people, not the White House. “I’ve risked it all, my entire life’s work, on two cards: the promise I made to the Catholic Church and, through the priesthood, the promise I made to the people of Klong Toey.
“My first promise, however, is to the people. When some folks hear me say that, they get upset. ‘What about God? You’re a priest, for Christ’s sake—He comes first!’” he said, feigning hysteria. “But God is the people, and the people is God, don’t ya see?”
Forty-four years after his death in 1787, Saint Alphonsus was honored for his “enormous tenacity of purpose” and canonized by Pope Gregory XVI.
But Father Joe was told no. Miss daily devotions? Never. Go to school if you must, but prayers and readings should be recited as always: inside the hallowed walls of the Holy Redeemer Church, an awesome alabaster sanctuary with a slanted and tiered roof designed to resemble a Buddhist temple. Only there, in a vaulted nave with a virgin white font at the door and a twenty-foot-tall gold-varnished statue of Jesus at the altar, should a Redemptorist priest offer up daily liturgies.
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If interested, you may download Chapter 1 on publisher's website HERE
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
The following is excerpted from The Gospel of Father Joe, a book that explores the true story of a dynamic slum priest who founded the Mercy Centre and builds schools, orphanages, AIDS hospices and more on squatter land -- illegally and w/out permits -- in slums of Bangkok.
Set up: Eight-year-old Fern was born with HIV/AIDS, her infection traveling prostitute to father to mother (dead) to newborn (now dead).
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© 2007 The Gospel of Father Joe
Fern had died five months before I returned in the spring of 2006. Death was a blessing in the way such things are blessed. Tuberculosis had spread to her spine and confined her to a hospice bed, and toward the end there were no belly laughs, smiles, giggles or huddles of little girl gossip.
The October day that Father Joe had pulled music teacher Mary McLean aside and said, "C'mon, there's someone who needs a song," Fern needed painkillers more. By the time he and McLean arrived in the AIDS ward, Fern was in a numb haze. She stared through Father Joe and Mary with eyes that looked like mud puddles. "I don't think she wants a song right now," Father Joe whispered.
Instead, he comforted Fern the usual way. He quietly caressed the nappy hair at the top of her forehead, the softest of the soft part that's called boi. For longer than Mary remembers, he leaned over her bed and silently combed two fingers — middle finger laid loosely over the index — through the wispy strands. The light touch was a last luxury.
About a week later Mercy's children placed trinkets into Fern's small fiberboard casket, inside the unzipped body bag and next to a small bowl of rice (nourishment, Father Joe said, for the journey ahead), and tucked her burgundy change purse near one of her hands. They had checked it to make sure it was weighted with heavy coins. "They wanted her to have a little something to buy candy with, you know, for when she got to heaven," Father Joe said.
There had been three customary days of monks chanting the Buddhist sutras, and at the funeral the children heard the refrains about there being no escape and no waking up. Nee mai pon. To go and not return. Lap mai dhern. To sleep and not wake up. Just before the cremation Father Joe sprinkled Fern's tiny corpse with holy water and burned a small joss stick wrapped inside a rice paper lotus flower. He whispered a few rosaries, none of which fit the death of a child, he said, "because children aren't supposed to die." He helped the temple monks push Fern's casket into the furnace. All of it was routine by now.
The monks scattered Fern's ashes where all of the ashes of the slum's Buddhists end up: into the canal alongside the slum bridge, five crumbling concrete steps down a craggy Slaughterhouse slope littered with cigarette butts, potato chip bags, empty cans and crumbled newspapers. An English-language billboard towered overhead, above the bridge overpass where city commuters can read it as they return uptown. It advertised the Bathroom Design I-Spa bathtub made from imported dark granite and with six adjustable whirlpool jets. The humungous photo staring down on the Slaughterhouse slum sparkled with a rectangular tub filled with Caribbean blue bathwater. Contrasted with the dung brown canal fed by a city sewage pump, it looked bluer still.
Nee mai pon. Lap mai dhern. The monks poured Fern's ashes into the canal, where they floated with so many other things, then drifted further downstream toward river and sea.
Mercy's children and staff, the temple monks and Fern's chain-smoking father had attended the cremation. Afterward, Father Joe approached the father off to the side, the same young and handsome AIDS-infected man who'd confessed to him months earlier, "I've killed my family, I've killed my family." The same guy who couldn't resist using his daughter's deteriorating health as flypaper for panhandling.
He squared up to him, looked him gently in the eyes, and said, "You know I think you're a real asshole."
Fern's father stared at his feet.
"But," Father Joe continued, "when the time comes and you can't take care of yourself, you can come live with us. We'll take you in and care for you. You're family."
Fern's father began crying and kneeled to the ground in front of Father Joe, who reached down and lifted him up. Telling me the story now, several months later, Father Joe's voice sounded like he was in a complete state of jai yen. It's about forgiveness, he said. Anger, resentment, judgment, arrogance inflict accuser and accused, and to forgive is a gift to himself. Anger's burden is too heavy, he says.
"You know, he probably didn't want to get AIDS. He probably didn't want to kill his wife. He probably didn't want to kill his daughter. And he probably didn't want to be there watching his dead daughter be cremated."
We were on the second floor of Mercy's campus just outside the cafeteria, alongside the cream-colored wall where Richard Gere had scribbled two years earlier, "All happiness comes from cherishing others."
"I don't need to kill him again, do I? It's not my job to kill him, is it? It's my job to tell him he did an asshole thing. It's also my job to tell him, no matter what, in spite of all of this, there is a place for you. When it gets bad, we will take you in. We're here for you, too."
He thought about that for a second.
"And that's what mercy is about, isn't it?"
I wasn't sure if he was referring to the highest attribute of Christ or if he was referring to Mercy, the charity. I figured it didn't matter.
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
Triplets Fon, Fa and Fai in the slums of Klong Toey, Bangkok, Thailand.
Long story short, the following is excerpted from a part of the book where a wealthy German donor visits the Mercy Centre with 13 million euros to give away to charity and gives Mercy approximately 400 euros (roughly $500 at the time). I was standing with Fr. Joe and the German donor in the main breezeway of Mercy in March 2007 when I observed the following:
(c) 2008 The Gospel of Father Joe
Father Joe told her about the triplet girls who’d just that second skipped past us. Fon, Fa, Fai were their names—bossy, gentle, and fragile, in that order. They were seven years old, ranked at the top of their class, and slept in the orphanage upstairs in single beds shoved together as one.
In a tone I’d use to describe a bargain at Costco, he explained to the German that a year or so earlier, the triplets’ stepgrandfather was about to bid the girls out to brothels. Father Joe knew the man, a junk cart pusher who was fond of his liquor, and made a preemptive offer for the girls, convinced that the old drunk would be too tempted to turn it down. He was correct. In exchange for two cases of Mekong whiskey, the man handed the skipping triplets over to Mercy.
The German woman had smiled approvingly throughout the story, gasping at all the appropriate spots. She’d then written Mercy a check for 20,000 baht (roughly 400 euros or $500.) Father Joe had thanked her kindly, looking no more or less impressed than when he’d met her.
The following day, in a voice just as subdued, he told me, “We appreciate every penny. But please, please, please do not come in flaunting the fact you have 13 million euros to give away, you don’t know what to do with it, and then say our kids are worth a nickel.”
--
To search through the book, read reviews and excerpts go HERE
For more information on Father Joe's work and charity visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
Miss Grasshopper as a baby.
Long story short, her father is also her grandfather, an old guy who regularly raped Miss Grasshopper's mother, the old guy's stepdaughter, named Noi in the book. The grandmother was an aging Bangkok prostitute and hustler who was dying of AIDS. To pay off gambling debts, medical bills and for new, expensive HIV medicine, Miss Grasshopper's grandmother (Noi's mother) was trying to recruit her teenage daughter, Pim, into prostitution. At the time, Pim lived at Father Joe's Mercy Centre in the Klong Toey slums of Bangkok.
Just FYI, Miss Grasshopper's father/grandfather and mother (Noi) also had AIDS. Miss Grasshopper's aunt (Pim in the book) did not. Pim graduated this spring from a United World Colleges program in British Columbia.
--
Excerpted from pp 284-286 in The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok:
Noi’s daughter was about a year old the first time I saw her. The Mercy staff had nicknamed her Miss Grasshopper—for her lively, hopping spirit—and she lived on the main campus in the upstairs orphanage where Tigger, Pooh, and Eeyore seem to spring in 3-D from the walls.
“So now you could glance at this baby and think about how her stepfather was raping her mother and they both had AIDS, and then you’d say, ‘What a mess, what a terrible mess. What can we— we—possibly do for her?’” Father Joe said.
He looked at me like he expected an answer. I didn’t have one.
“That’s when you have to look again. You take a second look.”
We were looking at her now. She was in a downstairs day care room surrounded by other toddlers with similarly harsh stories. She padded across the polished teak floor and bellied up to the baby gate in front of us. A knot of friends followed, eager for a better view of the big guy they always see patrolling the place and the stranger who had tagged along. Father Joe and Miss Grasshopper stared at each other for a few seconds, she looking up, as at the foot of a mountain, and he looking down and smiling.
“Now, when you take that second look at her . . .”
He paused and babbled playfully in Thai.
“. . . you say to yourself, ‘OK, this baby is going to be so special and so neat, and we will raise this child to be a nurse or a doctor or a teacher, something that will end up helping us all, helping society.’ What a wonderful blessing she is.”
Miss Grasshopper was wearing a clean white primrose blouse and a beaded bracelet, and her chubby cheeks and arms made her appear like she was still swaddled in baby fat. Each time Father Joe leaned forward and said, “Jah-aye, jah-aye” (the Thai equivalent of peekaboo), she smiled and babbled back, blowing spit bubbles.
“Ahh, she’s a great kid,” Father Joe said, leaning back to survey the blessing, folding his arms contentedly across his belly. “She’s a happy kid, a smart kid. She’s going to do real well.”
If all goes as expected, she will grow up in the same house that Aunt Pim had and revel in spaghetti night and movie night and sleep in a big barn curled up in a nightly slumber party whispering long past the housemother’s call for lights out. Someday she
might even apply to a United World Colleges program. She had already been blessed with a head start, Father Joe said, nodding, smiling, and still staring down at her.
“She does not have AIDS,” he announced triumphantly. “She checked out clean!”
That alone was a miracle, he said, considering the circumstances. With that, he began walking me to a motorcycle taxi that would return me to my hotel and then to another midnight flight home to D.C. Looking back as we walked out, he spotted Miss Grasshopper and rejoiced again in the good news: “Can ya believe it? No AIDS!
See, this story had a happy ending.”
He quickly corrected himself.
“No, no, a beginning. A wonderful journey awaits her.”
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For more information in Father Joe, the Mercy Centre, the book or to read reviews, excerpts, etc., go to www.TheGospelofFatherJoe.com .
For Father Joe's tax-exempt US office go to Mercy Centre Atlanta, aka The Human Development & Children Foundation.
The Three Mystic Apes or Three Wise Monkeys embody the proverbial principle: See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. A symbol of Japanese folk religion and a mantra to live by. I've read that Gandhi, a believer in non-possessions, carried a small ornament of these Three Wise Monkeys with him all the time.
For MACRO MONDAYS theme "Wisdom"
Macro of a small brass ornament, 4.5cm x 3cm or 1.75" x 1.25"
© The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
Father Joe and a preschool graduate at the March 2007 graduations in the slums of Bangkok where he's opened 32 preschools illegally on squatter land.
For anyone who doesn't have time to read the entire book (I just described nearly all of us, eh?) you should at least read the Huffington Post review. The Huff Post is a liberal and political juggernaut considered top-rate important for books. Its columnist here provides a cliffsnotes version of The Gospel of Father Joe.
Just click on PETER CLOTHIER COLUMN or read my cut-and-paste of Peter's review below:
(c) Huffington Post
IT'S THE HUMANITY, STUPID!
by Peter Clothier
Okay, so I'm a bleeding heart liberal, and my heart is bleeding all over again.
I have just finished reading The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok by Greg Barrett -- a book that has allowed me to put a human face on much that I have read and heard about only through news media before. Nicholas D. Kristof, for example, in his New York Times op-ed columns, has been tireless in bringing the issues of poverty, malnutrition, slavery and child prostitution to the public eye.
This Gospel, set as its subtitle suggests in the slums of Bangkok, paints a markedly different picture of this Buddhist land than those of us who have learned from Thai Buddhist teachings might like to fancy. That image would be one of mutual compassion and tolerance, enlightened care for people of all kinds: Barrett shows us the greed and exploitation, the devastation of drugs and alcohol when mixed with abject poverty, ignorance and destitution. He shows us the children racked by hunger and disease, farmed out to the sex market by diseased and desperate parents. He shows us the filth of the slums with their rickety, rat-infested shacks and waste-filled gutters and streams...
But wait... this is really NOT what Barrett's book is about. It's there, unavoidably, a grim social background against which the story of the book takes place. It's important for us to believe in its reality, to "get it" at a gut level -- as Father Joe, the central figure of this narrative, insists the author do. Having consented to have his story told by this journalist from far-off Washington, DC, this worker-priest demands no less than up-to-the-eyeballs immersion in the challenges he deals with daily in his dedication to the poor -- and particularly the children -- of this too-easily forgotten corner of the world.
No, the book is really about salvation, about hope amidst the hopeless, about compassion -- not as some kind of religious imperative but as lived experience. Meet Father Joe, then, larger than life, tough-minded and outspoken, the Redemptorist-trained Catholic priest who embraces with catholic (small "c") enthusiasm the teachings and practices of the Buddha and Islam where they square with his own passion for human justice. Alternately jolly and outrageous, loudly intolerant of all hypocrisy and cant, no matter whether it emanate from the Pope himself, he does endless battle with the prevarication and rejection of accountability that allow such slum conditions to prevail. He is ruthless in the face of greed and evil -- and soft-hearted enough to melt with human compassion for the sick and undernourished children he takes under his protection.
Father Joe runs his Mercy Centre with boundless energy and tireless dedication. The story of his work in the pitiless back alleys and shanties of Bangkok is a remarkable one: as a result of it there are today more than thirty preschools offering shelter, protection and -- most importantly, in Fr. Joe's view -- education to some 4,200 otherwise neglected children. No less a selfless slum-worker, surely, than the better-known Mother Teresa of Calcutta, he earns every bit of the praise lavished on him in the foreword to this book by Archbishop Desmond Tutu -- and the recognition from Thailand's Queen Sirikit herself.
Based on his own meetings with Father Joe, his keen observer's eye, and on numerous early-morning interviews in Bangkok's Lumpini Park, where the priest engages in his daily run, Barrett tells his story sometimes with the objectivity of the experienced journalist he is, but also often as a poet, deeply stirred by the poignant contrasts between the deprivation of the slum-dwellers and the material excesses of the contemporary developed world in which he and his family live. As a skilled story-teller, he leaves until the very last the discovery of the source of Father Joe's love for these children in his own history: "Any success I've had with damaged children," the priest confesses to the writer toward the end of the book, "is because I was a damaged child myself."
What makes the book particularly engaging for me, however, is that Barrett writes also as a truth-seeker on his own behalf. We realize before too long that it is not just Father Joe and the slum children that he's writing about; he's engaged in the search for his own humanity, his own soul, his own understanding of God and the role of religion in his life. One of the key questions facing the religious mind today, I think, is how to justify the belief in a benevolent, all-powerful God who permits the existence of so much evil and cruelty in the world. Barrett finds his own answer in the slums of Bangkok and the heart of Father Joe: it's in the persistence of hope, the boundlessness of compassion, the practice of human mercy.
During a 2007 ceremony at Mercy in the slums of Bangkok, left to right, Father Joe, who is the slum's Catholic priest; next to him, the son of the slum imam (the older slum imam, Fr. Joe's good friend, died in 2006) at the end, the slum abbot.
From Chapter 1 of The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
The story begins like the parable it’s become, in a no-man’s land with the seed of dreams strewn in the most foolish of places: slum rubbish. This was the 1970s when few people believed anything good could grow from the backwater of the undeveloped world. There were no official addresses or property deeds in the cordoned-off corners of Bangkok, nothing much for the municipal books, just putrid ground so primal and bleak that land was free for the staking. It’s where squatters pretended to own real houses and children made do with make-believe.
But these seeds were sown by an angry young Catholic chased from finer society. A priest, stubborn and cursing. The local Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians nurtured that seed, and in time the people and the priest, the abbot and the imam, worked together, as though the Buddha, Muhammad, and Jesus Christ were brothers and best friends. No doctrine, dogma, or creed was lorded. No growth tethered chapter to verse. The only belief that mattered was the one they shared. In the children. That was common, sacred ground.
Nourished like this, the seeds exploded with growth. There was a harvest, then another and another. The seeds grow still today, more than three decades later, a genus of hope thriving in the muck, as if it had been indigenous to the slums all along.
Tales of it grow too, spreading from those roots in Thailand to the media of North America and Europe, and in the retelling, it can begin to sound legendary. How in Gideon’s name does something grow from nothing and multiply like New Testament fishes and loaves?
But nothing about it is myth. Every tale is true.
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To search through the book, read reviews and excerpts go HERE
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
photo copyright / Bill Haggerty
© 2008 The Gospel of Father Joe
Excerpted:
Distance paints poverty in abstractions that invite comfortable conclusions. From a Bangkok Banyan Tree hotel suite or the Chalerm Mahanakhon Expressway, the Slaughterhouse is just a crust of rusty tin over the lazy poor. Unless the effects begin to spread uptown, things like fetid canals, shuttered butcheries, and daily compounded interest rates can go ignored.
Father Joe interpreted bureaucratic indifference as permission. If no help was coming, then by God, the people would help themselves. The first of Mercy’s squatter preschools sprang up informally and unnoticed in 1971 in a crate wood and metal shack pieced together like other shacks—in strips, like papier-mâché. It was near the Buddhist temple down by the slum bridge, not far from the first slum preschool that had been run since the mid-1960s out of the one-room shanty home of Imam Selep Develah. It served a couple of dozen poor Muslim children for 1 baht per day, but the imam usually settled for one fistful of rice or the promise of it.
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For more information on Father Joe go to www.TheGospelofFatherJoe.com
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
© 2008 The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
For Literary Reference group: Author, Greg Barrett. Publisher, Wiley Books. ISBN: 0470258632
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Excerpted from Chapter 8:
Father Joe typically arrived for our interviews at Lumpini Park around four o’clock in the morning. That way he could unload his bag of worries and jog alone before I intruded.
I always arrived at a quarter to five, fifteen minutes early, just to impress. (I’m not sure he ever knew.) Sitting and waiting on a park bench wearing blue jeans or khakis with a collared button-down shirt and a work satchel strapped across one shoulder, I must’ve
looked oddly out of place. Predawn joggers would eye me curiously, and I’d immediately scribble drivel in my wallet-sized notebook, as if that somehow explained who I was and what I was doing in the park at that ungodly hour, dressed for work rather than exercise.
At the precise appointed time, Father Joe would emerge from a park lamp’s yellowish glare, and he’d look at me oddly, too, his face slightly strained, unable to force a smile. He looked like a man arriving for a dentist’s appointment. Following our perfunctory “good morning” and “howdy-do,” I’d stick an iPod-thin recorder into his sweaty front pocket. He’d wince, as if it were intravenous, then grit his teeth and soldier on. A devout introvert, Father Joe is great with kids and a charismatic speaker and fundraiser when needed or called upon, but he avoids the topic that pains him most: his own life.
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If interested, you may search the book on Amazon HERE.
You may download Chapter 1 on publisher's website HERE
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
I saw this little guy on the brick walkway by our front porch. Interesting how well they can move over things. Nature sure is amazing.
I took this photo of Mercy Centre in 2000. I returned in 2005 to a renovated Mercy centre.
[First if two parts]
© 2007 The Gospel of Father Joe
Excerpted from early in book:
The motorbike braked in front of a two-story ramshackle building. White paint on wood and concrete was faded to the color of dirty rice, and burglar bars on the ground-floor windows were chipped and rusty. To me, it looked like a journeyman’s boxing gym—Muay Thai, they call it in Thailand. With a nod of his helmet, the motorbike guy pointed toward a darkened breezeway that seemed more like a subway tunnel than an entrance to a hospice.
One wall was painted dull pink, the color of Pepto-Bismol. The other was a canvas for a cityscape, an artistic row of brownstones beneath a blue sky full of white cottony clouds. A white breezeway sign with blue foot-tall Thai and English letters read “Human
Development Foundation” and, in smaller letters underneath, “Mercy Centre & Community Human Development Centre.”
[FAST FORWARD IN BOOK to 2005, a half dozen chapters later]
During the five years I was away, the Mercy Centre had continued renovating, building, and expanding, completing $3 million of upgrades paid for by a devout Catholic from Georgia, John M. Cook, whose name was now emblazoned on the new two- and
three-story cream-colored buildings crowding Mercy’s half-blocklong campus.
An international business executive and philanthropist, Cook had heard Father Joe speak in the spring of 1997 at the Holy Spirit Church, a parish in the leafy suburbs north of Atlanta. He’d left church that day as smitten with the plain-talking priest as the poor were in the Slaughterhouse. “If you’re a Christian, be a good Christian. If you’re a Buddhist, be a good Buddhist,” Cook would tell me a decade after he’d heard Father Joe’s ecumenical message, reciting almost verbatim the Mercy refrain of righteous conduct over pious devotion.
As founder and chief of an Atlanta-based auditing and profit consulting firm with business in forty countries, Cook travels a great deal and frequently visits Asia. His schedule brought him to Bangkok a month after Father Joe had spoken at Holy Spirit during a brief tour of North America. To raise money for the poor, Father Joe had begun mingling with Western wealth, preaching, glad-handing, and basically collecting alms like a saffron-robed monk holding out a bowl for donations.
Cook, an easygoing, silver-haired grandfather of three, had told Father Joe to expect him in Klong Toey. But when Cook gave Mercy’s address to the concierge at his usual Bangkok haunt, the world-famous Oriental Hotel, he was advised to stay away from
that part of town.
You need to go where, sir?
Klong Toey, Cook said.
No sir, you don’t want to go there, the concierge warned. It’s as bad as anything you’ll find in Calcutta.
[PART II - Next photo, the new Mercy Centre]
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here
© 2008 THE GOSPEL OF FATHER JOE
We met before dawn each day in Lumpini Park, a tuft of sanctuary set like an island against the surging traffic of downtown Bangkok. Think Central Park, but smaller, busier. There are jogging trails, Bo trees, Buddhist shrines, manmade lakes and ponds, and enough squalling, squealing, screeching fowl to nearly drown out the sounds of a city of six million.
Monitor lizards the size of small crocodiles slink along Lumpini's shorelines in search of food, and one morning when Father Joe saw breakfast being served he couldn't help but inject himself into park Darwinism. He struck the snoot of a four-foot long lizard with a stick, freeing a frog that hopped away excitedly. Judging by the spring in their steps, both the emancipated and the priest deemed the intercession righteous.
For reasons no Catholic need explain, Father Joe believes the child-friendly amphibian to be infinitely more divine than the fork-tongued reptile.
"I can't stand those things," he said, staring at the defeated.
By the time I returned in 2005 the slum orphanage/charity had completed three million dollars of renovations and additions paid for by a Catholic donor from Georgia. At one end of its block-long campus was a director's house built alongside a new four-hundred-seat preschool. Nong Bla and Nuth were still there (AIDS Orphans) relatively well and in school. Poi had died alone at two o'clock one morning. Her heart was enlarged and tuberculosis raged inside her. It was six days after her twelve birthday.
"When is my mom going to come get me?" she had asked shortly before she died.
"We dressed her in a new pair of shoes so she wouldn't be embarrassed when she went to heaven. We didn't have any children's caskets; we had only the big adult-sized caskets. But that was OK. We put her in a big casket and that way she would have a bigger room in heaven. That's what we told the kids," Father Joe said in a voice that cracked, and if he hadn't changed the subject I would have.
We were in Lumpini Park and his eyes began to water.
"Now look over there." He pointed. "Isn't that neat?"
It was a class of tai chi spread out on a Lumpini field, not unlike the dozen other classes of tai chi we had passed that very morning.
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To search through the book go to www.TheGospelofFatherJoe.com
For more information on Father Joe's work and chairty visit the Mercy Centre website or its USA tax-deductible equivalent here