Father Joe: A half century of service in Bangkok’s slums
Schedule
Wed Jan 18 2023 at 06:30 pm
Location
Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand - FCCT | Bangkok, BM
Few foreigners have achieved such revered status in Thailand as Joseph H. Maeir, the priest simply known as Father Joe in the Bangkok slum community where he lives and works.An American Redemptorist priest, Father Joe found his calling among the descendants of Catholic Vietnamese migrant workers and the Thai poor living in the vicinity of the pig slaughterhouse in Klong Toey, the sprawling mostly wooden slum abutting the great port of Bangkok.
Father Joe co-founded the Human Development Center, better known as the Mercy Center, with a Thai Catholic nun, Sister Maria, in 1973.
2023 marks Father Joe’s half-century of service to the slum dwellers, providing education from kindergarten level upwards, an outreach program and legal aid services for children trafficked into the sex industry or surviving on the streets.
Father Joe was the driving force behind a landmark HIV/AIDS program that fed and housed people of all ages living with AIDS, as well as children orphaned by the disease during the height of the epidemic in the 1990s and beyond.
The Mercy Center’s work extended to the indigenous Moken community in southern Thailand following the Asian tsunami in 2004. Its home care program for people living with AIDS -- delivered by HIV-positive people -- provided a model that was replicated elsewhere in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
Father Joe gained a loyal readership of his Bangkok Post column filled with human stories about the foibles, heartbreaks and strengths of people UN officials call the “urban poor” but he calls “family”. He authored Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse, and The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok.
The Mercy Center has assisted tens of thousands of Thais in need and garnered recognition from HM Queen Sirikit.
From Hollywood star Richard Gere to US President George W. Bush, Father Joe has hosted global celebrities and dignitaries at the Mercy Center. But he is more at home walking along the duckboards and narrow alleys of the slums, or sharing an ice cream with one of the children who live at the center. The center’s slogan: “We Stand Together with the Poor”
https://www.mercycentre.org/new/
Join us at the FCCT for an evening celebrating Father Joe’s remarkable life and service, and hear his concerns about how Thailand’s underprivileged still need far more attention.
Father Joe will be joined by Khun Choy, a Mercy Center lifelong staff member, Tom Crowley, author of Mercy’s Heroes – The Fight for Human Dignity in the Bangkok Slums, and Tew Bunnag, a longtime senior consultant at the Mercy Center.
Members free, 300 baht for non-members
Where is it happening?
Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand - FCCT, 518/5 Ploenchit Road, Maneeya Center, Penthouse, Bangkok, Thailand