How We Help The Human Development Foundation, a non-denominational, community-based organization, began in 1974 with the works of Father Joe Maier and Sister Maria Chantavarodom in Klong Toey, Bangkok’s largest slum. Their first project was a one-baht-per-day kindergarten. Within the next two years, they opened Klong Toey’s first outreach health clinic as well as a…
“All of your stories are so sad,” a friend said. “Are there any happy stories in the Bangkok slums?” He’s from a nice neighborhood, doesn’t know Klong Toey, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him the happiest story I could think of at the moment—about a thirty-one-year-old woman named Samlee….
Miss Kanok-tip is President and Pioneer/Founder of the Klong Toey Slum Chapter of the Physically Handicapped, that is, the Five Kiosk Workforce. At thirty-eight years of age, she’s tough in some ways but very fragile in others. Never went to school. Lost one leg from bone cancer years ago. Just recently her husband, while working…
Miss Teacher Froggy called three times in ten minutes. Her messages had been totally clear and blunt as always, but I didn’t get it. The fourth time she phoned, it sunk in—and boy, did her words hurt: “Fire!” Miss Teacher Froggy said. “There’s a fire next to the school. The drug smokers set the slum…
The slum kids in her kindergarten class call her Miss Teacher Froggy—Kru Kee-it—and every year she tries to get them to call her by her proper title and given name, three beautiful syllables in Thai. But the name somehow sticks to the roof of the mouth and kids forget it. Kru is Thai for teacher…
Nowadays, when people say they’re from Klong Toey, they get a funny look, like they’ve just stepped on something smelly and tracked it on someone’s nice, clean rug. The fast food chicken and pizza joints won’t deliver here after five o’clock anymore. As for taxi drivers, forget about them. Their policy hasn’t changed for over…
They’ve closed the slaughterhouse for almost two months now. Why should that be news? Because when they mess with the bowels of the city, it affects us all. The Slaughterhouse slum serves as a barometer: tell me what’s happening in the Rong Mu, and I’ll give you a “tea leaf” reading of the city, accurate…
Outsiders say the old pig, cattle and water buffalo Slaughterhouse neighborhood at the southeast end of the Klong Toey slums, just where the river wraps around the port, is a dangerous part of town. Some even say it has the worst reputation in Bangkok, one it has earned from decades of crime and violence. But…
This is a story about children who sell flower garlands on the street corners of the Klong Toey slums, their moms and a new law that is child-friendly. But it’s still hard for the law, policemen, courts, lawyers, or social workers to save a kid when the moms and their cohorts won’t play by the…
Is it a love story or a tale of survival, a heroic cry for help? Maybe just another grim account from Bangkok’s uncaring streets? You tell me. But first, let me tell you about Ang and Tuk. Both Ang and Tuk are drug addicts, not all the time, but more often than not. And they…
