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  • News & article

    The lost scavenger

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 13/05/2018

    » From the second floor window of their flat, Pretty Molly sees her slum scavenger husband returning from a day of foraging. Her snippy stray mongrel barks excitedly as Pretty Molly begins shouting out the window to him.

  • News & article

    Christmas legends of Klong Toey

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 24/12/2017

    » Our kids love to tell the story year after year, Christmas after Christmas. Tell their version, the way their grandmothers and great-grandmothers told them. These are the oldest Catholic people still alive in the slums. Way back in the old Catholic slaughterhouse area of Klong Toey, you can hear the living legends told.

  • News & article

    Klong Toey's future finest

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 01/10/2017

    » He's 10 months old now, Master Tack. Happy, good-natured, smiles a lot, not afraid of stray cats and scavenger dogs. They like him; he likes them. It all works out. At night he doesn't cry. You'd love him. A great baby. Well, not totally "great" just yet, but give him time. He will grow up to be one of Klong Toey's finest. Just watch.

  • News & article

    A slaughterhouse love story

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 02/07/2017

    » She's a slaughterhouse kindergarten teacher. Her whole life through and through. And her husband was a boy who grew up just over the footbridge crossing the canal to the other side, next to the temple. And her face becomes more beautiful day by day. Serene might be a better word. Her whole life of 48 years. She has been teaching slaughterhouse kindergarten children since her middle teens.

  • News & article

    Tragedy of a street kid success

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 29/05/2016

    » Why tell this story? Why take the effort to try and remember an 18-year-old street kid who drowned in the Chao Phraya River, half snockered on drugs? So, even though dying and drowning were the last things from his mind, drown he did, die he did. And it was kind of his own fault.

  • News & article

    Ducking for cover

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 20/04/2014

    » Let me tell you a story of Master Gan — a new child at Mercy Centre — he’s Songkran and Easter, all at “a mighty five years old”. Right now, he’s not at his mental and physical peak because he’s got chickenpox — but he’s almost well again.

  • News & article

    Miss Mott's Slaughter House survival

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 17/11/2013

    » This is the harsh story of our own Miss Mott and the home-grown, inbred violence and drug savagery that seeped into Klong Toey's Slaughter House a few years back. Miss Mott was Slaughter House-born in the Year of the Rabbit _ the most gentle of creatures _ destined never to hurt anyone or anything but with predators all around.

  • News & article

    Ms Teacher Lady

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 06/10/2013

    » Let me tell you about an old-time Klong Toey revolutionary: a slum kindergarten teacher. Still going strong in her seventh cycle of years _ that makes her more than 72. But don't dare ask her if her beautiful hair is turning slightly grey, even around the edges. No guns, no knives, only pencils and paper and nursery rhymes. You'd say: ''What? A kindergarten teacher revolutionary? You're daft.'' But that's the gig. As long as she can remember, that horrible proverb rattled around in her head _ not enough children to tend our water buffalo. Even as a little girl, she told her mum _ that's not right. And schoolmarm mum said: ''You're right my daughter, so you change that.''

  • News & article

    A Christmas story, Klong Toey style

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 23/12/2012

    » They tried to lead a normal family life, but they were always looking back over their shoulders ... never quite sure if Herod's soldiers knew, when they killed all those children in Bethlehem more than eight years before, that Jesus had escaped that horrible nightThe children at our Mercy Centre don't really worry about time and space, so yesterday, today and even tomorrow all become ''right now''. If a story rings true to them, they ''buy in''. Like all kids, ours have an unerring sense of what's real and what's fake. And without exception, they like the story of Christmas. So here at Mercy, we celebrate Christmas every day, but especially on Dec 25, when we follow our Sacred Traditions.

  • News & article

    Two fortunes linked together _ Klong Toey style

    Spectrum, Father Joe Maier, Published on 17/06/2012

    » It all went down in Aunty Tien's Noodle Shop, also known as the Klong Toey Slaughterhouse local ladies' noodle shop, where the matriarchs of the neighbourhood trade stories and gossip. Aunty Tien is the proprietor. She had taken the girl in, a teenager on the run from the brokers, sleeping nights in a stall at the Klong Toey fresh market.

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