The Gospel of Father Joe
Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
by Greg Barrett
foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
major media
Los Angeles Times
October 2, 2006 Monday
The World
COLUMN ONE
Mercy Comes to a Slum
For three decades, Father Joe Maier has made it his mission to take in the throwaway youths of Bangkok's largest ghetto.
BYLINE: John M. Glionna, Times Staff Writer
SECTION: MAIN NEWS; Foreign Desk; Part A; Pg. 1
DATELINE: BANGKOK, Thailand
Like a proud parent, Father Joe Maier dotes on his children -- such as the young beggar boy whose dad got him high on paint thinner and gave him broken bottles to cut his arms so he'd look more pathetic to passing motorists.
And the sexually abused triplets -- the girls' mother was dying of AIDS, their father in jail, their grandfather a drunk. Maier paid the old man two cases of whiskey to rescue the trio.
Now the ruddy-faced 66-year-old Roman Catholic priest smiles at a girl laboring over math homework, her oval face strained in concentration. He recently bought the solemn 16-year-old from her drug-addled mother, who needed cash for gambling debts. He paid 1,000 baht, or about $26.
The child, he says, is priceless.
"She came very near to being sold into the sex trade," says Maier, a Seattle-area native. "Instead, she's going to school for the first time in her life. She's now a very happy girl."
The abused beggar boy and triplets are thriving under his care as well.
For three decades, Maier has been a straight-talking guardian angel watching over Klong Toey, Bangkok's largest slum, a grim sprawl of swamp muck, garbage and tin-roofed shacks. Sandwiched between a droning freeway and the Thai capital's gritty port district, the ghetto is home to 100,000 impoverished Bangkok residents.
Since founding Mercy Center in 1972, the priest has ventured on foot into the slum to rescue outcasts from cardboard hovels, garbage-can homes and freeway underpass hobo camps.
Many others are abandoned on his doorstep -- left by AIDS-stricken mothers with few choices or shamed parents mired in drug and alcohol stupors.
To most, they are Thailand's throwaway youths. But for the priest known affectionately here as Father Joe, they are family. "You try to give a kid a chance to be human for a while," Maier says. "You shoot them like an arrow into the wind and you hope for the best. You want to show them that for one bright, shining moment of their lives there was a Camelot called childhood."
The recent case of John Mark Karr, extradited to the United States from Thailand after falsely confessing to the 1996 slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, has given Maier new momentum in his battle against child sexual abuse.
Although statistics are hard to come by, international rights groups say 200,000 children and women work in Thailand's lucrative sex industry, where underage victims fall prey to pedophiles from Europe, South America and the U.S.
For years, Maier has offered refuge. He has spirited sexually abused kids to safe houses to avoid pedophiles and hard-luck parents who would sell them back to their abusers. He has shepherded them to court to testify against traffickers, helping to send some to prison. "The pedophiles offer parents money for their addictions in exchange for access to the children," he says. "They say that one day the kids will forget the sex. We say they will never forget. They are scarred forever."
His sprawling Mercy Center in the heart of Klong Toey, part of his nonprofit Human Development Foundation, has five orphanages and shelters, and the nation's largest free hospice for mothers and children with HIV and AIDS. About 220 children live here full time, more than 50 of them suffering from AIDS.
Started as a one-room schoolhouse where he taught the children of pork slaughterhouse workers, the foundation operates 33 slum preschools serving 4,000 children daily -- all on a $2-million annual budget he solicits from the Thai government as well as local and international donors.
Maier is himself the product of a broken home -- the son of an alcoholic father who deserted the family. Longing to see the world, the young priest arrived in Southeast Asia in 1967, landing in Klong Toey five years later.
Each day, the Grateful Dead-loving priest makes his rounds at the complex through its grassy courtyard overlooked by palm trees. Wearing blue jeans and untied leather shoes, his eyebrows flaring like two exclamation points, Maier is a gathering storm of talk and activity.
Sometimes profane, he often juggles three stories at once, regaling listeners in fluent Thai. He offers adults a \o7wai\f7, the traditional Thai greeting with pressed palms resembling a quick prayer. The children get a streetwise knuckle punch to show he's one of them.
Maier has his favorites, such as the 35-year-old man with Down syndrome he found abandoned on the street years ago. Nicknamed Galong, or "bird without a nest," the man is the center's good-natured mascot. There's also the speechless teenage girl in a wheelchair who smiles as Maier leans in and touches her arm with parental tenderness. As for the babies with AIDS, he coddles them the most.
Outside Mercy Center, Maier's gruff style with Thai politicians and others he blames for the problems in Klong Toey have earned him critics. The outspoken Catholic priest in a country of more than 60 million Buddhists often steps on toes, some say.
Still, many government officials heed what Maier has to say: He is a frequent panelist on city commissions, and council members often call him for advice on Klong Toey.
"People say I fly off the handle, that I often go too far," he says. "But I'm only what I am. No more and no less."
Years ago, frustrated by the dearth of adequate housing in Klong Toey, Maier went back to school to earn a master's degree in public planning. Since then, his foundation has stepped in when the city government doesn't. After fires burned down swaths of the slum, Maier built 10,000 single-family homes that were far better than the old tin shacks.
"Father Joe is the surrogate parent to the slum's forgotten children," says Saisuree Chutikul, chairwoman of Thailand's Committee on Combating Trafficking of Women and Children. "He has a lot of influence."
Virat Sompobsupanart came to Mercy Center in 1982 as a troubled teen. He is now a community outreach worker. "Father Joe's mission is to allow people their dignity," the 40-year-old says. "He gets things done. And he isn't afraid of anyone or anything."
In a spare, no-nonsense style, Maier wrote a series of newspaper articles about Klong Toey that have been compiled into a book called "Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse." The title refers not only to the animal-killing stalls but to the many people trapped in the slum who fall prey to drugs, disease, violence and sex. Still, there are those who scratch out a survival, even success.
They are children like Gee. Maier found the boy, then 11, living under a freeway, using dirty rags to wash windshields at intersections to help care for his grandmother. He was also a drug addict, hooked on a mixture of cough syrup, soda and ground-up mosquito coil. He sniffed glue and paint thinner, a vile yellowish concoction known as 505.
Gee and some other boys had been approached by three British tourists who offered them money and drugs to pose nude for photographs and videos. For months, the men molested them.
When Mercy Center social workers discovered the youngsters, Maier whisked them to safety until they could testify against the men, who were later convicted.
"Society tends to fixate on the predators," Maier says. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, send the bad guys to jail, but what happens to the children? Who's taking care of them?"
With only half a year of schooling, Gee was illiterate. But he blossomed under Maier's care. He learned to read and write. He took up the guitar, often playing for the AIDS and HIV patients. He also protected Galong, the Down syndrome man, who is often hectored by street urchins. "He came here a glue-sniffing abuse victim and now he's a rock star," Maier says of Gee. "He no longer sees himself as a victim. He sees himself as Jimi Hendrix."
Now 18, Gee recently left the center for a restaurant job, but not before Maier sat him down for a heart-to-heart: "I said he had family here. And I told him that he was going to be a great guitar player."
Despite the successes, Klong Toey takes its toll. One boy with AIDS suffering from tuberculosis died days after arriving at Mercy Center.
"It's hard to see a child die before anyone was kind to them," Maier says, "to say goodbye to a kid who never knew friendship."
But Maier knows each child must confront death in his or her own way. He recalls his promise to one young AIDS victim that he would be at her deathbed. "Yet she didn't want me there," he says. "It's tough to die. It's tougher to do it when you have somebody there who doesn't want you to die. So she waited until I was gone. I was upset when I learned that. Then I got my head together and said, 'You arrogant SOB. That girl had to do things her way.' "
Suddenly, Maier's cellphone rings with bad news from Klong Toey. A teenage girl living at Mercy Center has been gang-raped at a nearby ghetto school -- for the second time. Maier is told the girl giggled as the boys took their turn with her. "Is this self-loathing? How do you protect a girl like this?" he says with a sigh. "We try to protect these children day and night. But we just can't be there every second."
So why does he stay? Why does he continue to do battle in a Bangkok slum, in a war he often does not win?
"Why go?" he counters. "By fate or the grace of God, I ended up here. After all these years, I have an obligation to stay.
"And anyway, where would I go? Who would want me?"
FATHER JOE: Slum Priest
See Video HERE
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We repeat a story today about a remarkable man working in the slums of Bangkok, Thailand. He is a Catholic priest known as Father Joe, who, over 30 years, has set up schools that have educated thousands of poor Thai children. In the process, Father Joe Maier has skirmished with all kinds of people from drug dealers to church hierarchy. He is tough, irreverent and totally committed, as Phil Jones reports.
PHIL JONES: Children singing the national anthem of Thailand -- it's how their school day begins. After the anthem, it's time for their prayers, led by the teachers.
TEACHERS AND STUDENTS: Bow once to the Buddha. The Buddha is great.
JONES: What's so unique about this scene is, the kids are praying to Buddha in a Catholic school. But that's just fine with Father Joe Maier, who says he doesn't care if the children say their "Hail Marys" to a statue of Buddha as long as they know some prayers to help them deal with life. They live in Klong Toey, amidst poverty, drugs, gang violence, and child sex abuse. Father Maier came here more than 30 years ago and never left.
Father JOE MAIER: They accepted me. They gave me great honor. They gave me great, great honor and said, "You can come and stay with us."
JONES: Joe Maier grew up in Washington State an angry young man, his mother a Roman Catholic, his father a Protestant.
Fr. MAIER: My father was -- he wasn't a ne'er-do-well, but he was a weak man. He drank a lot of whisky, didn't take care of us. I hurt a lot. I hurt bad. I said, "I really want to help other children so they don't hurt like I did."
JONES: Living in Klong Toey is truly living on the wrong side of the tracks. In that direction -- about a mile away -- all the symbols and structures of wealth in downtown Bangkok. But go on the other side of the tracks in that direction for about a mile -- and two miles long -- and you'll find the worst of Bangkok's slums.
Father Joe went to Thailand with two assignments.
Fr. MAIER: To become a missionary priest and to work with the people and to convert them to Christianity and become holy, I guess. They converted me, though.
JONES (To Fr. Maier): Who converted you?
Fr. MAIER: The Buddhists and Muslims. I've only learned to be a Christian by learning from the Muslims and Buddhists: tolerance and calmness and peace.
I used to live back here.
JONES: Father Joe chose to live in a slum shack located in the slaughterhouse district near the seamy port of Bangkok.
Fr. MAIER: Don't think there's one honest, lawful occupation in this whole slum. It's a great slum. It's a community. They live together. This is where life goes on.
JONES: The young priest thought it was, in his word, "cool" to live in the midst of all the thugs and gangsters.
(To Fr. Maier): Why did you feel you had to live right here, in this slum?
Fr. MAIER: Because that's where Jesus would be. You can't live uptown.
JONES: Back in the '70s, as he walked through Klong Toey, he saw a problem he could do something about.
Fr. MAIER: We said, "Heck, kids aren't going to school. Let's start a kindergarten."
JONES: He did, and now there are 33 preschools teaching 4,000 kids. Most of the teachers got their start in these same slum schools.
Fr. MAIER: This might be the only chance for them to learn. Seventy thousand children have graduated from our schools, our kindergarten. And they're going on to school. They know how to read and write. And that's really neat. We've given them a gift they'll never, ever lose. What a glorious way to spend your life.
JONES (To Fr. Maier): Better than being a priest, a minister?
Fr. MAIER: Oh, I'm a priest. But, yeah, I'm a priest. This is what priests are supposed to do.
JONES: Besides the schools, there's a Mercy Center, which is a campus that provides housing for homeless kids who have been rescued from abusive parents or orphaned by the AIDS crisis. There is also a hospice for adult AIDS victims.
At another building -- a safe house for girls. They look happy, but all have sad family stories. They've been saved from the world of violence. One mother sold her daughter for about $100.
Fr. MAIER: This is the slum where the girls who work at night live.
JONES: On this morning, Father Joe has put on his Roman collar and is headed out to raise money. His foundation spends nearly $2 million a year. Less than one third of this money comes from the Catholic Church and the Thai government. All the rest comes from grants, corporations, and organizations that hear about Father Joe and what he's doing in this faraway Bangkok slum. Today he's headed to a Shell Oil Company office to pick up about $1,000 donated by employees.
These plaques bear the name of major individual donor John Cook. He's a wealthy Atlanta businessman who has given more than $3 million for expansion of facilities at Mercy Center -- including a new home for Father Joe.
Fr. MAIER: Oh, look at this, here comes the AIDS brigade.
JONES: It's a brigade of children -- most of them born HIV positive. The Mercy Center is their home. On this day, they stopped by the office after school for some candy and compassion from the staff and Father Joe.
(To Fr. Maier): Are these kids going to survive?
Fr. MAIER: No, they are all going to die. This one might make it forever. The two boys won't make it. The two boys won't make it. But you do what you can -- day by day by day.
JONES: After candy, the children line up for what's called cocktail time -- their medicine. It will keep them alive for a little big longer.
Fr. MAIER: We're a house of hope and of joy and of life. You've got AIDS, you've got AIDS. You die, you die; but, you know, that's tomorrow. You live right now and here, today.
JONES: But still, the reality is painful. Jeanne Hallacy, a documentary producer, has seen how Father Joe struggles when watching a child desperately clinging to life.
Ms. JEANNE HALLACY (Documentary Producer): Father was with her in those final days. She was in a lot of pain. He got down on the floor, and he leaned next to her and held onto her and told her, "I'm right here, I'm not going to go away. I'm going to be with you all that time until you go; I'll be with you." To me it was a great act of his faith, and it was a great lesson of someone who has faith, who acts it out.
JONES: In more than three decades of doing things his way, Father Joe has often been at odds with the Church hierarchy. For example, scenes like this -- a Catholic priest going to a Buddhist temple -- don't sit well with his superiors, some of whom he calls arrogant.
Fr. MAIER: They don't even know Buddhism exists, and Islam, and all these things. Please quote me on this. What are they going to do? Make me live in the slums of Klong Toey with people who kill pigs? Live with AIDS people?
Ms. HALLACY: The Church, the hierarchy in Thailand as well as in the Vatican, think Father Joe is a bit of a loose cannon, a wild card, a fiery, spontaneous guy that's out here, a quintessential slum priest.
JONES: But Hallacy thinks the Church realizes Father Joe is here to stay.
Ms. HALLACY: Father Joe is a local superstar. He's a hero. He's a household name -- someone that every person in this entire slum knows, and he knows many of them by name, and he knows their kids' names.
JONES: One way or another, he's brought the good faith of the Catholic Church to a Thai-Buddhist country.
Ms. HALLACY: They love him. They love him.
JONES: Every Saturday night Father Joe has a mandatory Mass. The children give thanks, but it's done without the Catholic ritual. As Hallacy puts it, it's more like a gathering of the tribes.
Ms. HALLACY: Every week those tribes have to gather like a family council. They commune, give pause, and give thanks to the greater being. He has them learn prayers, but he doesn't enforce it upon them by way of stripping away their Buddhist identity. He's not an outsider imposing something foreign upon a Thai slum community.
Fr. MAIER: I could never, ever, make it as a priest in the United States.
JONES (To Fr. Maier): Why?
Fr. MAIER: They'd throw my ass out so fast. Everything I do breaks these funny little rules, everything in the Church.
JONES: Father Joe Maier claims he was "born to be a priest." But for the poor kids of Klong Toey he is more than a priest -- he's the angel in their slum.
For RELIGION AND ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Phil Jones in Bangkok.
Father Joe’s
Unlikely Blessing
An American priest has dedicated his life to giving the slum dwellers of Bangkok what they need most
By Jim Hutchison
Nipaporn Buttakote was getting ready to wash before bed when she spotted the flames rac ing through her
neighbor’s home. “Come quickly ! ”
Nipaporn cried, grabbing her two young daughters. “There’s a fire!”
Sprinting across rickety cat walks, the small family sought safety in a nearby railway yard as smoke engulfed their shantytown beneath Bangkok ’s Asoke expressway.
The fire raged for three hours on that Friday evening in February 1999. But even as embers smoldered in last of nearly 40 flimsy wooden shack s, a 59-year- old American priest in a T-shirt drove up on the back of a motorcycle and quickly took stock.
“Father Joe” – as Joseph Maier is known to thousands of Buddhist, Christian and Muslim slum dwellers – ordered a half -dozen of his own helpers to distribute food, mosquito nets and sleeping mats. Then, as he had so many times before, Maier rallied Nipaporn and her neighbors, all of them illegal squatters on public land.
“ Unless you move quickly you’re dead meat,” he told them in blunt, fluent Thai. “If you don’t get your houses back up before the housing inspectors arrive after the weekend, you’ll be evicted.”
Then he sketched a drawing of a modest home of his own design and offered the people a church loan to the buy lumber and other supplies if they were unable to raise enough money.
Within hours the community elected a rebuilding committee. On Saturday evening, more than a dozen men set out to ferry eucalyptus poles across the Makkasan swamp beside the blackened ruins.
Meanwhile, others carried sheets of tin roofing through narrow streets to the underpass. Father Joe was there to supervise the hasty construction. The poles were driven into the mud and joined by two-by- fours; material salvaged from the fire was recycled to complete walls and roofs. Amazingly, Nipaporn and her neigh bors settled safely into their new dwellings by Wednesday morning when inspectors finally arrived.
Exhausted, the unconventional priest headed back to his own home – a small wooden house on stilts in the slaughterhouse section of Klong Toey, the giant slum that has been his parish for the past 28 years.
People's Priest
For as long as he can remember, Joseph Maier was restless, something of a rebel. Raised on a South Dakota farm in the 1940s, he jumped at the chance to attend Holy Redeemer College in Oakland, California, but struggled with strict seminary rules. One night the freethinking teen cranked up a recording of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and led his fellow seminarians in a foot-stomping jive.
An elderly priest burst in. “I’ll put you all on the next train home,” he thundered. Maier begged forgiveness.
“It won’t happen again,” he promised. But the young Redemptorist priest in train ing never abandoned his love of rock ’n’ roll music.
None could fault his love of learning, or his com mitment to the faith. But when he was ordained in 1965, exasperated superiors wondered what to do with the young man with the quick grin who listened to the Grateful Dead and fixed cars.
He was posted to Thailand and after a year of language study was sent to a Catholic village in remote northern Thailand. Later, he worked among H’mong hill tribes, many of them displaced by the Indochina war.
Toiling alongside villagers buildingirrigation systems with bamboo pipes, Maier learned to speak Thai and Lao, as well as a smattering of H’mong. Recalled to Bangkok after four years, he couldn’t settle into the quiet life at the rectory of the Holy Redeemer Church. He spent his days walk ing the streets, chatting with slum dwellers who were surprised to encounter a priest.
“You don’t even bother to visit the people who live in the shacks behind our church,” he later complained to the older priests.
Maier volunteered to say Mass in the tough Slaughterhouse district, where poor Catholics, catering to the growing Chinese population’s taste for pork, butchered the pigs that Muslims and most Buddhists refused to touch. The 30 families who gathered in a little chapel beneath Three Soldiers Bridge were happy to hear a foreign priest say Mass in fluent Thai.
He felt an instant rapport with the congregation, and soon spent most of his time with these workers and their families. Sipping iced Ovaltine while the men drank whiskey, Maier learned of the hardships they and so many others faced.
Thousands of laborers migrating from the countryside were squatting in slums that dotted the city landscape, with the greatest concentration in Klong Toey, where the Port Authority of Thailand controls most of the land. Basic needs like water, electricity and garbage collection were scarce in a com m un ity of 70,000 people.
Their children usually didn’t have the proper documentation that would allow them to attend public schools.
Meanwhile, the maze of hovels was home to rats and open sewers, and people in the poor community did anything to survive, including trafficking in drugs. Many of the kids sniffed glue and paint thinners.
Maier told his superiors he wanted to move in to help these people. They were uncertain; no priest had done such a thing. Maier was stubbornly insistent. Finally the Redemptorist community granted permission and the cardinal made him a pastor.
Slaughterhouse Cup
The foreign priest with the big smile and twinkling eyes became a fixture. Homeless and latch key kids followed him everywhere.
"Khun Paw!" (“Father!”) they hollered, swarming over the priest who dressed in street clothes. His sermons stressed simple virtues of compassion and generosity. He used donated money to send children to school. “No one will go without an education,” he declared.
His congregation grew. To help the children even more, Maier needed a kindergarten and a shelter. He got donations from the Church. But he also headed to the notorious girlie bars of Patpong, where he asked for money from the tough owners of these establishments. That took brass – and several donated.
The Church scraped together enough money to take two rooms in a four-story building on the edge of the slums. With the help of Sister Maria Chan, a great advocate of the rights of slum children, the Human Development Center (HDC) was soon filled with youngsters who got a rudimentary schooling and a hot meal.
HDC workers, parents and kids filled in buffalo mud-wallows and leveled a piece of swampy ground to bui ld a soccer field. Then an excited crowd watched as ten-year-olds in bare feet played their hearts out, running coach Joe ragged.
The following weekend he was astounded to learn that neighborhood drug dealers had laced the children’s water with amphetamines so they would run faster and make them more money on bets! Father Joe and a mob of angry parents confronted the perpetrators. The drug dealers were scared off and a whole league, with volunteer coaches and referees, would prepare youngsters to compete for the annual Slaughterhouse Cup.
Unlikely Student
On the surface, Maier’s self-help efforts were bearing fruit. In fact, he was deeply troubled. Most of the slum residents lived in constant fear of eviction; many had lost their homes to fires. “Where can we live?” they asked again and again.
Only a proper dwelling would entitle its owner to a home registration number, which in turn could lead to proper municipal water and electrical connections, as well as access to public schools. With other community activists, Maier continued to frustrate efforts to evict slum dwellers, encouraged squatters to stay put and beseeched city authorities to pipe in tap water.
Once, Maier tied himself to a slum dwelling to block an eviction. Still, he felt stymied, and the ubiquitous rats in festing the slums became a symbol of his frustration. He couldn’t even...
Tue May 27, 2008
By Elizabeth Yuan
CNN
BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- In Klong Toey, a Bangkok district between a highway and the Chao Phraya River, families of four share motorbikes, street vendors sell residents pouches of food, and doors of homes are open to the outside. A salesman on a bike cart sells broomsticks, while motorcycle taxi drivers, dressed in orange vests, wait at a corner.
The neighborhood is a lively one, with the smell of food and the sounds of children. It also happens to be poor with a reputation as Bangkok's largest slum.
Port and slaughterhouse workers, day laborers, scavengers, vendors, glue sniffers, prostitutes, karaoke singers, grandmothers and people struggling to get by are among those who bring children to Mercy Centre's preschool in this neighborhood. The school is one of 29 that Father Joe Maier's Human Development Foundation (HDF) has opened to serve Bangkok's poorest children -- about 3,900 today. Another two schools are set to open next week.
The Mercy Centre is also home to street kids and orphans, children affected by HIV or whose parents are mentally ill or too poor to care for them. Mothers with HIV and AIDS also have a home here, and the Mercy Centre's adult hospice is the final shelter for the dying who don't have family or are destitute.
Teenage girls preparing for school and a group of boys gearing up for a morning football match greet Father Joe with fist-pounds, a form of respect that doesn't carry any sexual overtones as hugs might, the blunt Catholic priest explained.
For many, he is considered a father who has tried to keep children from falling through the cracks back onto the streets for the past 35 years.
The 68-year-old has been the priest of what has been known as the "Slaughterhouse" neighborhood, where chickens, cows, and other animals were butchered and gutted for Bangkok's consumption until the 1990s. A smaller version of the slaughterhouse operates there now.
Since 1974, when HDF's first one-baht-a-day school opened in Klong Toey under Father Joe and Sister Maria Chantavarodom's watch, it is estimated more than 35,000 children have graduated from the foundation's schools, gaining an education that would prepare them for government-sponsored primary school.
Today, the school fee has gone up to 10 baht a day (31 U.S. cents), and for the one-fifth of the children whose parents can't afford it, their tuition is subsidized. The same goes for uniforms.
At these pre-schools, children get their first education in Thai, English, Thai history, folklore, dance, song, sports, arts and hygiene from teachers who also are from the slums. Milk, lunch and snacks are provided. A third of the schools are sponsored, as are about 1,000 children from preschool to "wherever education takes them," said John Padorr, adviser to the Mercy Centre.
While primary school -- generally begun at age 7 -- is free, books, uniforms and other fees can prove costly for parents in a community where the highest earners are those making the minimum daily wage of 194 baht ($6), Padorr added. The Klong Toey Women's Group and Savings and Loan, at the Mercy Centre, helps its 400 members not only deal with domestic problems but shore up financial security to pay for their children's schooling.
The effort is a remarkable one in a country where nearly 1 million primary school-aged children are not enrolled in school, and even more fail to complete secondary school, according to the United Nations Children's Fund in Thailand.
Children who fall through the cracks include those who are born without birth registration, who are homeless or live in illegal shelters, and who have HIV/AIDS.
Father Joe and Sister Maria started their first school more than 30 years ago because "kids were not accepted in government schools," he said.
The one-baht-a-day fee was charged to give parents "ownership" of the school so that they would value their children's education, Padorr added. The earlier parents become involved, the less inclined they'd be to pull their children from school to help as workers or caregivers during the secondary school years, Padorr said.
The home for street children followed and, a year later, a health clinic for the poor. Then a housing program was begun to move hundreds of landless families into new homes, and that expanded to rebuild entire neighborhoods lost in fires, a common occurrence here.
As AIDS started hitting neighborhoods, HDF workers began explaining to communities what AIDS was, so that families wouldn't be afraid to send their children to school where youngsters affected by AIDS were also attending. A legal aid center, now in its 11th year, defends street children in legal cases.
Other communities asked Father Joe and Sister Maria to open schools there as well.
The children here look after one another, said Padorr, pointing to Rin, a mentally disabled former street kid who gravitates toward the children most in need of help, like 7-year-old Phon, who's blind.
Father Joe -- an American from Longview, Washington -- came to the neighborhood in 1973 as a missionary priest after a few years working in Laos. "Buddhists and Muslims taught me how to be a Christian," he said. Klong Toey is a sacred place, Father Joe said, with a mosque, a Catholic church and Buddhist temples. "It's home, where we all live," he said.
The children at the Mercy Centre are raised Buddhist and go to temple -- as well as to Mass, Padorr added.
Father Joe wrote about many of the children in his book, "Welcome to the Slaughterhouse," the royalties from which support HDF. A biography about him, "The Gospel of Father Joe," by journalist Greg Barrett, came out in March.
Nitaya Pakkeyaka, a 38-year-old manager of development and fundraising at HDF, used to live next door to Father Joe in the Slaughterhouse. She went to one of the kindergartens, and her sister was one of the first in the neighborhood to be baptized and also was one of Father Joe's students.
Their father drove pigs to the slaughterhouse and people in taxis. He died when Pakkeyaka was very young, and her mother got a day job as a housemaid for one of Father Joe's embassy friends, Pakkeyaka said. At night, the children helped the mother clean the slaughterhouse of pig parts.
It was Father Joe who helped support Pakkeyaka's education through college, she said.
If there were no Father Joe, Pakkeyaka said, "I don't have today. If I don't have him, I don't think I would now have had a good education. I wouldn't have had a chance to speak English. I would have gotten married at 15 instead of 28. Not just me, many people would think."
When she got married, Father Joe gave his house as a wedding present. "Opposite my mother's house," she said.
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