Our children rushed home from school last Friday afternoon to receive a group of special guests – The US Third Marine Expeditionary Force Band – a traditional 12-piece military marching band of the highest caliber and spirit.

Most of us have heard near countless versions of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” but for our kids the song was new, refreshing, and exciting. (Also it was beautifully played.)  A few of the many highlights:

• Our blind girls Nong Peh and Nong Fon not only heard their first Sousaphone; they also held onto it while it was being played and felt its sonorous vibrations!

• Our boy Galong danced up a storm. (He believes, perhaps quite rightly, that every upbeat tune is for dancing, and who are we to tell him otherwise?)

• The band invited our children to conduct a few songs, and they didn’t miss a beat.

• Our children returned the favor by performing music on their own traditional Thai instruments.

• The band played a gorgeous rendition of the classic R&B song “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" here in our Mercy Centre.

Finally, inevitably, chaos ruled. Galong persuaded the rest of our Mercy kids to join him on the dance floor. Photo gallery here.

This past week Israeli Ambassador H.E. Itzhak Shoham and his wife Madam Dalit Shoham made a special visit to our Mercy Centre to meet the students who attend our Janusz Korcack School for Street Children.

Honoring their visit, our Korczak school children performed a traditional Thai dance, and served food they prepared themselves and coffee brewed from their own Korczak coffee stand. Ambassador Shoham gave a Hebrew blessing for the children, their teachers, and their school.

The Ambassador’s visit sends a strong and positive message to the street children attending our Korczak school, letting them know that they are important - that their lives and their education are meaningful. His visit also strengthens our own teachers' love of teaching and guiding Bangkok’s poorest children.

Janusz Korczak, a hero to the people of Israel and Poland and children around the world, was a Polish-Jewish doctor, writer, and orphanage director, who pioneered the legal rights of children. In 1942, when his Jewish orphanage was removed to the Warsaw Ghetto, Janusz Korczak refused an offer of help for his own safety. Months later, he and his children walked together in quiet dignity to the train bound for Treblinka, where they perished. Our school is dedicated to the memory of Janusz Korczak and to the children in his care.

Photos: Above: Kindergarten children present a gift to Ambassador Shoham, whose embassy has helped connect 15 of our 22 preschools with computers and skype. Below, our Korczak children perform classical Thai dance.

Her dowry was a nice gold chain and sacred medal. His? A threat: a knife and a gun displayed on the table in front of him – a reminder of what would happen if he didn’t take his vows seriously.

It all went down in Aunty Tien’s Noodle Shop.

Auntie Tien – proprietor of the Slaughterhouse Ladies Local Noodle Shop, where the matriarchs of the neighborhood trade stories and gossip – had taken the girl in. A teenager on the run from the brokers. Sleeping nights in a stall in the Klong Toey fresh market. Auntie asked around.  No one knew her.  She was just a “stray.” So Auntie Tien gave her a home and protected her. She became Auntie Tien’s assistant at the Noodle Shop.

The girl, in her middle teens, was from the border in the far North.  Fragile. Not sickly, but almost. Not a first choice for marriage. She couldn’t hold up under long hours in the rice fields and would quickly lose her pretty looks, so best move her on to Bangkok. She was attractive enough, and in Bangkok, they don’t know anything about rice fields. A woman who came to the village now and then gave her parents a down payment and said she would get the girl a nice job.

Old-time protection against guns and knives can be engraved on to the skin, but as 'Uncle' found out, even the shaman's best inks are powerless against the pain of shame and lost loved ones

Published May 27, Bangkok Post, Spectrum

By Father Joe Maier, C.Ss.R.

He doesn't wear amulets, but says his tattoos are the best on the planet. Amulets, nowadays, can be fake, or even worse – not even blessed, no power. You can't be too careful. So tattoos are safer. His Chinese dad told him that long ago.

And Uncle Mongkhol's tattoos are real, no doubt about that. Thumb-nail size on each shoulder and barely legible, faded by time. But ancient beliefs say that a khom tattoo does not lose power or potency through the years. Both tattoos are letters written in Khmer script, signifying ''mother'' on one shoulder and ''father'' on the other. Uncle says quite piously that the letters are to remember his beloved parents. No doubt about that, but not quite so piously, a khom tattoo from years gone by is comparable to the awesome Gaw Yawd (Nine-Pagoda Peak), strongest of all tattoos for those who live by the gun and the knife.

Old-time protection and healing for both police and gangsters against lethal gunshots or knife wounds, together with a sachet of sacred blessed herbs (worn around your neck), which you swallow immediately if wounded, either by gun or knife. These herbs are expensive and most difficult to obtain. Plus, you must believe. Trust the potency of the herbs together with the spiritual strength of the shaman who bestowed them upon you.

Dear Everyone,

This is the second recent news article about our work with the Moken – the ethnic Sea Gypsies – on Koh Lao, an island in Ranong Province. Both articles focus on the plight of these poor island villagers who have lost much of their past and are lost in the present.  We are doing for the Mokan what we have always done for the poorest of the poor – we are sending their children to school and taking care of the moms and grandmoms. In addition, because of their precarious legal status in Thailand, we are working in myriad ways with the entire village, together with the local provincial government, to help these poor seafarers gain recognition and status as permanent Thai residents. Please read the articles at your leisure (the earlier one is posted below), and help if you can. Many thanks, as always, for all your support.

Prayers, Fr. Joe

Moken Gypsies Find Themselves at Sea in the Modern WorldSydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 22, 2012 (For slide show with commentary from Fr. Joe, please visit here. Photo above by Jim Coyne.)

Article by Lindsay Murdoch

They live in stilted shacks on a mudflat above piles of oyster shells, broken glass and rubbish, their nomadic days on the seas of south-east Asia gone forever.

Liya Pramongkit, an elder and midwife of Thailand's largest group of Moken-speaking sea gypsies, saw her people on the small island of Koh Lao dying at the rate of one a week, many of them starving mothers and babies.

"We have lost our traditional way of life as our children no longer hear the stories that have been handed down by our ancestors," Liya says, her deeply lined face showing the hardship the Moken have suffered since they were forced to leave their seafaring lives, where the only things that mattered were the tides, the fish, the storms, the moon and the sea spirits.

"Before, when we lived and died on the sea, life was much better," she says.

More than three decades working in Bangkok's slums did not prepare Catholic priest Joe Maier for what he saw on Koh Lao when he made his first 30-minute boat ride here from the Thai fishing port of Ranong, in south-west Thailand, four years ago.

"The people were literally starving to death, trapped between the modern world and the Moken world," Father Maier says. "I have never seen people as poor.