Facing Poverty

Prologue to my just-released narrative nonfiction book, THE GOSPEL OF FATHER JOE: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok

 

 

 

 

 

Prologue

Facing Poverty

 

 

 

 . . . for those spirit/truth seeking friends who long ago stopped trusting anything from a pulpit

        — FATHER JOE MAIER’S PERSONAL DAILY JOURNAL 

 

 

Father Joe’s catwalk slum wasn’t the first place I’d come face to face with what World Bank economists call “extreme poverty,” a definition pegged in 1990 to the ambiguous threshold of “income equivalent to one U.S. dollar or less per day.” I’d seen its face before, and I’ve seen it since, both as a reporter and as a spectator.

 

On the bumpy ninety-minute ride from the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica, to my honeymoon suite in Ocho Rios in 1992, I stared at it like everyone else: from a Sandals Resort bus with an iced bottle of Red Stripe in my hand. If the reggae of Bobby McFerrin hadn’t played nonstop in our air-conditioned tour bus, an otherwise perfect honeymoon might’ve felt like something less. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” became our lilting mantra.

 

On assignment in Egypt following 9/11, I saw it in the unfinished cinderblock apartment complex en route to the childhood home of American Airlines hijacker Mohamed Atta. Veering off the road leading into Giza, I discovered that the abandoned construction site was government housing, though some windows, doors, and plasterboard were missing. Children emerged from the slabs of concrete looking like they’d walked straight off the pages of Dickens: little faces smudged dirty, grimy ankle-length abayas and thobes, and Western-styled shirts and jeans looking like hand-me-downs that had been handed down a great many times.

 

In Iraq, as war approached in February 2003, I saw it in a Baghdad garage where an Iraqi widow had fashioned a tidy two-room home for herself and her eight children. They shared an outhouse, a couch, and a single mattress on the floor. It wasn’t a problem normally, the mother insisted, but as the Pentagon’s threat of “Operation Shock and Awe” neared, one of her eleven-year-old twins had begun wetting the bed every night. A few days later in Basra, I watched school-age Iraqis play on a mountainous landfill reeking of raw sewage. Climbing down, I saw that their hands were flecked with a brown goo that someone told me later was the exact thing I had suspected. The same stuff I’d seen on the broken streets of Basra’s al-Jummhurriya neighborhood, where children dashed in sandals through gullies and potholes filled with urine-yellow puddles—and knuckle-sized human feces. Crap floated in such overwhelming abundance that parents had apparently given up. Mothers sat calmly on cement stoops and watched the young play.

 

Father Joe’s Bangkok was not much different. Different continent, different peoples, but the same culture of poverty.

 

“No one chooses to live in a slum,” Father Joe told me in 2000, the first time I saw his shack in a Bangkok shantytown. Its catwalk was planted in a canal that looked like a Basra landfill and smelled like an al-Jummhurriya street. “You’re never there by choice.”

 

But he’d been living on that catwalk for three decades. By choice. A squeaky-clean room in an air-conditioned Redemptorist monastery was his for the asking a few miles away on a shaded street across from a 7-Eleven. He never asked.

 

Leaving his slum in 2000, I couldn’t decide if choosing to live in muck and sewage with the poorest of the poor made Father Joe a madman or just madly devoted. But in the long run, perhaps it didn’t matter—masochist, saint, or masochistic saint—because in a void notorious for starving one’s spirit, he was feeding it. And in the act of feeding, he’d been fed. That much was obvious, because beyond the palm trees, rain trees, and indoor plumbing that made his Mercy Centre schools, hospice, and orphanages a shaded utopia in the middle of desperate poverty, there was something else. A palpable, powerful something else ran through the small campus, breathed a sense of joy into children dying. Although I couldn’t fully capture and define it, I felt it. That ineffable it.

 

Returning five years later to investigate what it was that I couldn’t put into words, I narrowed my inquiry to one or two questions. Each, of course, came layered with more.

 

Why didn’t the children in my affluent Washington, D.C., area cul-de-sac or in my own comfortable home hop and skip at the same excited clip as the sick, dying, orphaned, abandoned, abused, neglected, or otherwise broken children of the Mercy Centre?

What in God’s name did Father Joe know that I didn’t?

 

In my quest to know what he knew (as much as one could without living it), I visited the Mercy Centre with his blessings three times between 2005 and 2007. For a total of four weeks, I shadowed Father Joe, occasionally ate with him, consumed pots of coffee while sitting across from him, and just hung around his odd slice of heaven until I’d made a nuisance of myself. Our most fruitful discussions, however, occurred away from Mercy and the distractions that pull Father Joe this way or that way, often in midsentence.

 

In Bangkok’s blazing sunrises, we walked broad loops on weekday mornings in the city’s finest park. We talked God and politics, wealth and poverty, and matters of the East and matters of the West in my plodding effort to understand the magnanimous it— whatever it was that crackled through Mercy—and Father Joe’s effort to bridge our world of differences and similarities—economic and cultural, secular and religious.

 

All told, I would record nineteen hours of interviews with him in Bangkok’s Lumpini Park, a few dozen more outside it, and many more with just pen, paper, or Microsoft Word. These were bolstered by thirty-one hours of phone calls from my home to his in Bangkok and 641 e-mails (at last count) sent or forwarded from Father Joe to me. I met with his relatives twice in their blue-collar Washington State hometown and interviewed his former Bangkok Holy Redeemer Parish rector, who had retired to Seattle. When Father Joe’s mother passed away in the fall of 2006, I attended the funeral in her conservative hometown parish and went to the family party afterward; Kentucky Fried Chicken, cold beer, wine coolers, and lots of family history and laughter were shared. The morning following the burial of Helen Mary Maier in Longview, Washington, Father Joe and I met for our usual walk—this time in his hometown’s finest city park.

 

Our last face-to-face meeting for this book took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, one day after we’d flown to Vancouver Island to visit a Mercy child who is set to graduate in 2008 from Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific. We reviewed draft chapters in various states of repair on the afternoon of November 1, 2007.

 

Father Joe had just returned to his hotel energized by a speech given hours earlier by former president Bill Clinton at Vancouver’s Pacific Economic Forum. Clinton had spoken of the “godsend” of business opportunity available in the work that will be required to curb greenhouse gas emissions. He’d also warned of the dangers inherent in allowing our status quo to continue unchecked. If current trends in economic inequality and depletion of natural resources continue until 2060, when the world’s population is expected to hit nine billion people, there could be hell to pay. Terrorism, AIDS, Iraq, Iran, all the front-page worry that consumes federal budgets today, would be white noise compared to the Darwinian struggle that could ensue. Echoing world leaders secular and religious, Clinton stressed to a sold-out crowd of eighteen hundred that it was high time for nations, cultures, political parties, churches, temples, mosques—the whole of civilization—to start working together to safeguard our children’s futures.

 

“A herd of elephants is in the yard, and we’re sitting on the stoop counting ants,” Father Joe said, summarizing the message.

 

There was an urgency in Father Joe that afternoon as he paced in his hotel room listening to me read from a book that would bear his name. He seldom interrupted, and when he did, it was only to correct Thai translations or add details to anecdotes. A couple of times, I quit reading to ask if he would like to save himself unnecessary trouble, maybe soften some of the sharpest criticism he’d leveled at the pope or the Vatican or some other authority with an element of control over him. He’s an Old Testament Amos in his rebuke of the heresy he sees in greed and pious self-righteousness or in any religion that dares to invoke Christ while placing service of its own cause above serving the poor. He’d never asked me to go “off the record,” a request commonly made and granted on Washington’s Capitol Hill.

 

The last thing I wanted was to stir up trouble for a revolutionary Catholic who has no problem stirring up his own.

 

C’mon, I offered, let me redact some of the record.

 

He looked at me like I was a Washington bureaucrat or a Vatican robe.

 

“No,” he growled. “Print it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Gandré]

I have been some short time the witness of this gigantic project where you were about to show the world the real circumstances we only can guess in movies or a short documentation on TV; they never were so impressive like how you were reporting about poverty and abuse in the excerpts of your book. I am glad this book is published now and reflects all the shocking details without any alleviation, and I can tell, you placed them sensitively and accurate. May the book revenue a help for all the creatures whose perspective is just to hope for the next ration of food.