Mercy Centre in 2000
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
Mercy Centre in 2000
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