(This is the third [here and here] in a series of Diaries highlighting activities and organizations focused on informal communities, slums and poverty in Bangkok Thailand)
Among the many community organizations providing services to the poor and the residents of informal communities in Bangkok, I am especially fond of the HDF Mercy Center.
Beginnings:
HDF Mercy Center began in the Slaughterhouse area of Klong Toey, Bangkok’s most notorious slum. It was the brainchild of Father Joseph Maier and Sister Maria Chantavarodom. Fr. Joe, as he is affectionately called, was the parish priest for the Catholics who worked at butchering the pigs in the district. Sister Maria began teaching the children of the Slaughterhouse at a school she set up in a seldom used holding pen for the pigs.
According to Fr. Joe,
“In its early days, almost fifty years ago, the Slaughterhouse [in 70 Rai] actually was a safe and fairly healthy place to live. … Seven years ago, it all began to unravel. Authorities decided that the old method of butchering pigs, the way we had been doing it for generations, was not hygienic, and that it was time to move the Slaughterhouse. No work meant no cash for food. … The Slaughterhouse residents were told they would soon have to leave, that they were being evicted from the homes and shacks that their families had homesteaded for over fifty years — that they had no rights. … Authorities tore down the pigpens and cemented them over as a massive parking area for the trucks that carry products to and from the adjacent Klong Toey Port. … With the trucks came their drivers seeking drugs, alcohol and temporary female companionship. … The authorities would provide housing in new suburban slums outside of the city, miles and hours away from where they could earn a livelihood…. “ Maier, Fr. Joe. (2005). “Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse: The Battle for Human Dignity in Bangkok’s Bleakest Slums.” Singapore: Periplus
The HDF Mercy Center website describes these early days best:
"Sr. Maria and Fr. Joe turned a slum shack into a one-baht-per-day preschool for every child in the Slaughter House, children of all religions. No child was turned away. Thus (without saying so or calling itself anything) began The Human Development Foundation. Now, today in 2012, there are twenty-two Mercy Kindergartens with over 2,500 slum children going to school. Alumni of the first Slaughter House kindergarten are teachers, executive secretaries, nurses, taxi drivers, and butchers. Many are now married with their own children attending proper schools. Dead-end, throw-away slaughter house kids no longer."
Today
Today, the Human Development Foundation and Mercy Centre charity is responsible for thirty-two preschools that have taught more than twenty thousand children how to read and write. it also operates six shelters for abandoned, abused and orphaned children. In addition, it sponsors over 500 of the poorest neighborhood children to attend primary and secondary school as well as 12 children to attend colleges and universities abroad.
The charity provides home-care for the poor for over 500 patients living with AIDS in Bangkok helping them maintain their strength and remain productive members of their family and community. It also provides counseling and free access to medicine to over 10,000 high risk individuals/year
HDF has repaired, renovated, and constructed over 10,000 homes for elderly and indigent and slum communities devastated by fires in Bangkok slums and fostered small business start-ups, emergency low-interest loans and aided the physically disabled to secure employment, and legal benefits.
For those who may want to learn more about HDF Mercy Center or are interested in assisting it in its work I encourage you to go to their website at:http://www.mercycentre.org/...
Further Reading about Klong Toey and Fr. Joe
For anyone looking to dig deeper into the world of Bangkok’s slums, in addition to Father Joe’s book mentioned above, “The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok” by Greg Barrett, with a forward by The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu Archbishop Emeritus is a good place to begin. According to Publisher’s Weekly:
“Barrett, a veteran journalist, records the inspiring work of Catholic priest Joe Maier in Bangkok’s slums. Drawn to service in Thailand on a whim, the misfit American seminary student found a calling among the Thai downtrodden, even living in the slums himself. . . . many of the stories are memorable, from the tragic (street toddlers, happily schooled at Mercy, later dying there of HIV/AIDS, to the triumphant (Mercy graduates who attend college abroad and are able to climb out of poverty.”
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Today's Quotes:
"So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless."
Victor Hugo re: Les Miserables
"The tragic truth, however, is that the young as they age become conservatives, ethnic groups as the move into the middle class do so also. The gay community is now free to vote Republican without shame while the black community is prevented from voting even if they are Republican. And worse of all, the seven and eight year olds of our nation seem to have been indoctrinated in many of out schools to hate others as well as to despise science.
We progressives can slap ourselves on the back all we want, but as usual we have failed to grasp the grim realities of politics which is that it is an eternal war of attrition and the opposition is better equipped and trained while all too often all we have is our optimism to sustain us as the barricades are overrun while we wait for popular support that never comes."
Trenz Pruca
"Why would anyone be morally bound or wish to be morally bound to a civil society that does not share the goal that its citizens deserve a fair distribution of wealth, income and power? If the civil society is not dedicated to that end what else could it possibly be dedicated to? What is freedom, to those without wealth, income or power?"
Trenz Pruca