"The Shire," Lord of the Rings producer calls the Mercy Centre
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.
--
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
"The Shire," Lord of the Rings producer calls the Mercy Centre
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.
--
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