The shack immediately became a chapel kindergarten:   to teach the kids – including Miss Brown Rice of 50 years ago to learn to pray properly & read & write their names. . That  Our Lady of the River surely wanted her slum slaughter house children to be beautiful: know how to pray & read & write.  
And so it began.  Our first kindergarten in Our Lady of the River abandoned shack next to the canal leading into the River.  Our first slum slaughter house  kindergarten welcoming all:  Buddhist/ Catholic/Moslem.
 

She struggled out of the taxi with our street mom & the nice police lady – walking barefoot  – itchy, scratchy, but not hunched over, not afraid,  not like a six-year-old they just dragged out of the thorns & thistles & that other stuff: stinging nettles. Or just as bad, from pavement sleeping in a patrol station while her parents pumped gas.

Her little girl complexion:  imagine: buying a package of used mosquito bites at your neighborhood supermarket store – plus a full head over-loaded with lice.   
She was tears galore, but if you listened hard, you could make out her whisper, over and over, as tough as a five-year-old in rags can whisper;  “ I won’t cry’ no matter how you hurt me, you can’t make me cry.’ – I promised -  only nice girls who have mommies to hold them can cry & I don’t get no mommy to tell me she loves me.  

Actually, her tears are what saved her. A couple of our slum lads “the bhoys” as the Irish call their special lads happen to be riding by on their motorcycle: …saw her dad slap his daughter/  Slap her too much, too hard, shouldn’t have slapped her at all, but it was a habit with him. Mom just watched afraid.  He slapped her all the time also.  The ‘bhoys’ stopped & slapped dad too much  & too hard until his eyes jiggled.  He agreed to take daughter to hospital right then and there.

We call it: the Miss Brown Rice Petrol Station Miracle.  This is how ‘it went down.’ Our ‘bhoys’  

Happy New Year to all our wonderful friends and supporters! 

On our first working day of 2024, the Mercy Centre team had the incredible opportunity to meet with our Founder, Father Joe.

May your New Year be filled with blessings, prosperity and abundance for you and your family. The holiday season is upon us, and I wish you a time of love and warmth during this time of year. 

A Christmas letter.  The cart – or one like it –pulled by their donkey –(not shown)   that carried Pregnant Mary with St Joseph walking alongside  from Nazareth to Bethlehem, those nine days,  where Jesus was born – protected by the Angels/ witnessed by the Magi & the Shepherds    
 

During the last 55 years that I have been ‘stumbling, walking un-surely along rickety half mended wooden walkways in the slums of Bangkok’, I’ve never seen or heard of it being named a national emergency crisis – that means: no education of 3 to 6 year old slum orphans and daily slippery slope of being abandoned - those ‘dumped along the path, losing their moms & dads’. Welcome to the savage world of abandonment - no education - a slum orphan. 

The Klong Toey slaughterhouse - all of Klong Toey - was and is a savage place – we have tried to drench that savageness in the mercy of love and education and prayer for 55 years.

The kids – whose moms washed the pig guts each night in the slaughterhouse also asked to learn to read and write, so they could teach their kids for a brighter tomorrow. Maybe their kids could do better but there wasn’t much interest from the ‘higher ups’. Clean pig guts were urgent - education was not.

Then it changed.  A thrown away old book pretty much destroyed by wind & rain (been there forever) on the side of the road.