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 low and high places, but loved, and even revered, by more, or at the very least, respected for his spirit and fortitude in his determination to help the poor.
It was January 2, 2000, the start of the new millennium, and we’d met to celebrate numerous past failures and occasional victories, and a future of more of the same. A moment later, he ended his call, abruptly stood, and said, “There’s been a gas leak at the ice house. You want to come along?”
We ran to his ‘96 Toyota Corolla, and just seconds later, as he sped through the Bangkok night, driving as I’d never seen him drive before, he explained his fears—that this ice house was close to his Mercy Centre; and his Mercy Centre, as I already knew well, had homes for the children under his care and an adult AIDS hospice.
“Tell me what you know about Freon,” he said. “I don’t know much,” I replied. “What I remember from a high school science class is that it’s an odorless, colorless gas that has no effect on humans, but according to more recent studies, it screws up the ozone layer. Why?” He said they told him Freon was leaking into his neighborhood, Klong Toey, population 130,000, the largest of some 1,200 urban areas that are officially designated as slums in Bangkok. About a year earlier, Father Joe said, there had been a fire in the same ice house and it should have been shut down back then, but the owner paid a visit to a local politician, who paid a visit to a city inspector, who paid a visit to a fire official and nothing was done. That’s the way troubles are handled in Bangkok, and in much of the rest of the world as well.
We were still speeding through the streets, squealing as we hit the corners, bouncing into and out of potholes. I started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I had a thought. You know all those movies where the cop is driving an unmarked car and he gets a call, then reaches out the window and puts one of those flashing lights on the roof? I just had an image of you doing that, except you have a flashing crucifix instead.”
He laughed as we slid around another corner and the rest of the way to the factory, we argued about what kind of noise should be coming out of the car when the crucifix was in place. We agreed it couldn’t be a siren or anything that sounded like cops or an ambulance. I argued for Gregorian chants and Father Joe held out for “Ave Maria.”
At our destination, our joking stopped. “That’s not Freon. It’s ammonia,” I said as we exited the car and sniffed the pungent air, “and that could seriously kill somebody.”
All around us, street life proceeded as usual. At a food stall across the narrow street from the ice house, people ignored the bad smell and spooned up bowls of noodle soup. How unusual, after all, was an offensive odor in a Bangkok slum?
Father Joe assessed the situation and we took off on a trot towards his Mercy Centre, where once he was assured that everyone inside was out of harm’s way, he left me with a friend. Bangkok is one of those unusual cities where personal safety was much assured everywhere and at all times, but Father Joe insisted that unless you were from Klong Toey, you were better off with a local chaperon. As a longtime resident known in the neighborhood, he figured he was exempt from any such threats.
Father Joe traveled the hundred meters or so without me, arriving at the neighborhood police station, out of breath but firm of opinion and resolve. For the next twenty minutes, the portly, balding, sixty-year-old priest from South Dakota, whose mixed Irish and German blood boils at thirty degrees Celsius, the average daily temperature in Bangkok, informed the police who had the misfortune to be on duty that night precisely how they were shirking their duty. Why weren’t any cops on the scene at the ice house, he wanted to know. Why weren’t they on the community loud speaker announcing the dangers from inhaling ammonia gas? Was anything being done about the leak? Did they even know how harmful ammonia was? What was the plan if someone got sick?
In these situations, cops like to get rid of Father Joe as quickly as possible, even if they have to capitulate a little. So in a short time, it was agreed that the police would dispatch someone to the ice house with one of those battery-operated megaphones and search for any injured or ill, both in the plant and the immediate neighborhood, and if any were found, to take them to the hospital.
Then after collecting me, Father Joe and I hot-footed it back to the ice house, where he confronted the owner, who was sitting nonchalantly on the loading dock—the smell of ammonia still noxious in the air. Now, Father Joe gave him holy hell, causing him to lose a bit of face as there were several others present, but extracting a promise to pay for any possible hospital costs.
With the cops arriving and the owner getting up to greet them, Father Joe and I returned to his car. “This,” he said as we walked, “is how journalists and priests get killed.”
I laughed again. “Happy New Year to you too, Joe.”
[Four people were hospitalized and released in a day or two. The ice house was closed for a week while only the most perfunctory repairs were made to the pipes and gas tanks.]
I met Father Joe eight years earlier, in 1993, at a Christmas party held in his honor and attended by some of the numerous foreign expatriates who served as members of his unofficial support group. On the way, a mutual friend, who invited me to tag along with him, told a story about Father Joe.
As many as 10,000 Southeast Asian children were sold into prostitution each year, my friend said, and Father Joe bought children himself, but in his case, he bought them away from the brothels. One child, about eight, the daughter of a prostitute, was being kept by a brothel, along with other children born to prostitutes, and “raised like pigs on a farm” for future exploitation. Father Joe negotiated a price of US$800 for the child, what the brothel claimed it cost to feed and clothe her for eight years. Now she is enrolled in one of Father Joe’s schools and lives in one of the homes in his Mercy Centre, watched over by a mix of Buddhist employees and Catholic nuns and sisters.
At the party, as a journalist who smelled a book or at least a magazine story, I approached the reverend like a heat-seeking missile. The encounter was incandescent.
When I asked him how he ended up in Bangkok, he said he was a product of the Sixties: a priest, yes, but a sort of hippie, too, a Grateful Dead fan, a young man who, forty years later, still hadn’t cut the four-letter words from his conversational vocabulary. He said he was among the half-dozen of his fellow seminarians who protested the Vietnam War and the deaths at Kent State University, and lobbied for liberalization of seminary rules. He said that after he and the other mavericks were ordained, the church gave them the most remote and undesirable assignments. Father Joe said he had no interest in going to Thailand, but it was a free trip to the opposite side of the world at an exciting time and he figured that the church would have to bring him back eventually, so he went.
And stayed.
Now—over thirty years later—he is the director of a large aid and self-help organization that has enormous and effective reach among Bangkok’s poor. He has kindergartens all over the city, with over 4,000 slum kids enrolled. He also organized several playing fields in the slums and sponsors almost sixty soccer teams for the older kids.
“If the young kids learn how to read and write, they have a chance,” he said, “and if the older kids get to put on a uniform and play soccer or volleyball for a season, then they have a chance. If not, by age fourteen or fifteen, they’re lost and probably lost for good, and in their case, not for the good of anyone.”
We talked about several non-government organizations dedicated to ending child trafficking. I mentioned a few that I suspected were mainly well-meaning amateurs.
“Aren’t we all?” Father Joe said.
He went on to explain that the secret of whatever success he experienced was because he always played by the neighborhood rules. I asked for an example. He said, matter-of-factly, “Never steal someone else’s heroin.” He said he’d tell one story and then had to greet his other guests. The story was about a couple of fifth-graders who found a substantial cache of heroin in one of their school toilets, about a hundred packets. They took it to the principal’s office and the principal called Father Joe, who called the police and told them that their job was to roar over there in their police cars, sirens wailing, make a big fuss and search the school, then praise the children in front of the rest of the school and pin medals on their shirts.
“Those were the rules the police are supposed to play by,” he said, “and they did.” A day later, he went on, a few hoodlums approached these same children and slapped them around a bit. That’s a violation of the rules, according to Father Joe. First, they stashed dope in the school and then they intimidated school children. Two rules were broken and in Klong Toey, there’s no waiting for Strike Three. Father Joe called the police and told them what happened.
The hoodlums were “politely” asked to leave the neighborhood. Nobody has seen them since.
In the years since we first met, Father Joe and I have become good friends, something I consider a great honor, and no small part of that privilege is to hear Father Joe tell his stories with such empathy about his poor neighbors in the Klong Toey slums. Many of these stories spin the same web that entangles millions of the poor throughout the world and inevitably make you think of Mother Teresa. In fact, when Father Joe guided Mother Teresa around the Klong Toey slum in 1971, she said something quite simple that changed his life. She told him to stay in the slums, where the need was great.
When I tell people that Father Joe lived in a squatter’s shack with a corrugated metal roof for twenty years, they don’t believe me. For most of that time he slept on a simple cot, clothed himself out of the church box, and led Sunday mass for the residents of what’s called the Slaughterhouse. This is the part of the Klong Toey slum where for over fifty years, the livestock that fed Bangkok—cattle, but mostly pigs and water buffalo—were hit over the heads with metal pipes every night and then sliced and chopped into parts to be delivered to the city’s markets that open at dawn. Buddhism forbids the killing of any living creature and Islam avoids all pork, so the butchers were Catholics, many of them ethnic Vietnamese from several generations back.
Here, between the bustling port on the Chao Phraya River and the cement abutments of an expressway, thousands of poor ethnic Thais, Laos, Khmers, Vietnamese and countless illegal immigrants from Burma live in ramshackle shacks on stilts over a swamp choked with garbage and unrealized dreams. Many of them are part of Father Joe’s congregation at the slum’s Holy Redeemer Church. Joe is a Redemptorist priest. What that means, put simply, is that his focus is on redemption, the act of being set free, or saved. In other words, Father Joe is an eternal optimist.
In the early nineties, the Port Authority of Thailand, the government bureaucracy that owns most of the land under the Klong Toey slum, converted part of the Slaughterhouse into a parking lot for ten-wheeled trucks. They brought yaa-baa, a methamphetamine, right to the Slaughterhouse door about the same time that most of the slaughtering was moved to the city’s outskirts. This deprived many Slaughterhouse residents of work and introduced the replacement business: the merchandising of what the Thais call “crazy medicine.”
Methamphetamines were not new to the community but this time, they brought with them newfound and ostentatious slum wealth. It was interesting to see those who sold the stuff build new faux stone facades on their shacks and move in modern entertainment sound systems. They had their own enclave in one part of the Slaughterhouse near the new parking lot for trucks—a kind of slum Beverly Hills—until the Port Authority announced that it was bulldozing that area too. There was more profitable use for the property. More parking space for trucks.
By then Father Joe had seen the best and worst that humans can produce, and not all of it in the slums. When Father Joe talks about the “worst,” he’s probably talking more about various bureaucrats, politicians and law enforcement personnel than he is about his friends and neighbors in the slums, some of whom are pretty well deep into what the church calls sinful activity.
Father Joe’s view is that yes, many slum folks bring on their own troubles, but nine-and-a-half times out of ten, slum dwellers are the victims.
The hazards of slum life were numerous to begin with. Then crazy medicine took hold of the slums and raised the level of violence. At the same time, the number of homeless adults and children with AIDS swelled. Also, more migrant children from upcountry provinces ended up on Bangkok streets. After the economic collapse hit Southeast Asia in 1997, things got even worse. Many slum parents could no longer take care of their offspring. Domestic abuse saw a sharp rise in incidence, as did pedophilia, a malignant presence that has grown along with Thailand’s notorious sex industry through moral as well as economic poverty.
It wasn’t all bad news. Father Joe opened new schools, until there were more than thirty throughout the city’s slums. When the building that housed his first AIDS hospice and children’s homes was sold and he was given only a month to relocate, a local construction company put 400 men on the job twenty-four hours a day and built an eighteen-bed hospital and street kids shelter in time to meet the bulldozer’s deadline, in the least desirable place in the slum, hard by the busy port, where everything floods when it rains.
Today that building is gone, replaced by a new structure built on the generosity of a single brick-and-mortar donor. The new Mercy Centre includes an expanded home for over forty mothers and children with HIV/AIDS, a respite care facility for adults with AIDS who cannot care for themselves, an AIDS homecare and counseling center, four homes for the more than 250 children in the care of the foundation (two others are off premise), a street child outreach and law center that sees over 100 cases every month, a successful slum women’s credit union, a community service center responding to family and neighborhood emergencies, a jobs program for the handicapped, a three-story preschool with 500 neighborhood children in attendance, and what Father Joe is embarrassed to call “the director’s facility,” a two-story house in which he now lives—all of this on land the foundation doesn’t own, and constructed without approval or permission. Father Joe is a squatter, like those for whom his dreams were built.
Joe laughs when he takes people on a tour. “We’re mad,” he says. “Barking mad.”
Jerry Hopkins
Surin, Thailand 2004