Up until two months ago, a few mornings each week, just before his kindergarten class, Master Note, a nine-year-old boy in our care, rode his imaginary broomstick horse around our Mercy Centre compound. Note always rode behind his partner, Master Galong, who has a faster make-believe vehicle—an imaginary motorcycle. Sometimes, Galong has make-believe trouble starting…
We’re talking about street crime here: the violent, bloody stuff you can see. Not the uptown kind, like fiscal years and large purchases being timed according to retirement dates. Unsolved crime is fashionable in the Slaughterhouse, or Rong Mu. The rape of a thirteen-year-old girl a few months back, for example. They haven’t found the…
The Rev. Joseph Maier took a seat at the table across from me and as I ordered two mugs of Heineken draft, he took a call on his cell phone. Father Joe, as he’s known, is an American Catholic priest who’s lived in the Bangkok slums for more than thirty years—despised by some in both…
