Bangkok slums
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.
--
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
Bangkok slums
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.
--
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