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http://www.catholicage.hk.u/xmaspartyforagelesskids-thailand-slum
Xmas Party for Kids with No Known Age
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By: Fr. Lawrence O’Neal, SJ
What greater fortune than to be a Christmas baby, sharing a birthday with our Lord, and receiving twice the blessings? But for the street youth of Klong Toey, Christmas generally brings no gifts and, often enough, scant joy. Now, however, a tradition in this notorious Bangkok slum of 100,000, tucked beneath a freeway and within walking distance of the opulent hotels along the Chao Phraya and the flesh-pots of Sukhumvit, is providing joy, and some of Christ’s teachings, to an otherwise miserable sprawl of tin shacks and narrow mud paths, the kind of dispiriting urban blight found throughout the developing world.
On a recent trip to Klong Toey, your correspondent couldn’t help being shocked by the raggedy urchins with bandages on their cheeks and the emaciated men scarred with tattoos. Another prolonged season of rains—no apparent match for the devastating floods of a few years back, but still extreme—had swelled the canal, or “klong,” that I followed, a hankie pressed to my nose. Sewage poured from pipes, and plastic bags of feces, a feature of the earlier calamity, were beginning to appear again in the streams.
But if adults, including this one, suffered headaches from exposure to the conditions, it was nothing compared to the bouts of diarrhea once more devastating the children of Klong Toey. Access to clean water is a concern in the slum, though so far there are no reports, like last time, of snakes and crocodiles in those canals! (Plenty of wild dogs, some missing limbs.) Still, one must temper one’s anger at the sight of babies splashing in the foul waters, their weary, glass-eyed mothers showing no concern.
Every year, 50 million children are born on this planet without proper registration. Many are abandoned, nameless and diseased, at the doors of benevolent orphanages. As such, these poor creatures have no official existences, and besides often being excluded from schools and programs due to their lowly status, become easy prey for traffickers who trade in involuntary labourers or, more venal again, sex slaves.
Klong Toey alone may be “home” to several thousand Dickensian street children, who earn pittances begging outside hotels or at Bangkok’s main train station, suffering, one imagines, a host of indignities, not the least being the sallow, Hades-hot air of this infernal city, and the noise pollution, mostly from motorcycles and the horrid tuk-tuk, a mechanical snarl comparable to a lawnmower.
But on Christmas Eve those at-risk youth are given the chance to celebrate “everyone’s birthday,” even if they don’t know their real ages or identities. The party, organized with the help of the tireless workers at the Miracle Centre, is necessarily simple. A cake baked by staff, hearty foods provided by neighbours, and watermelon and candies bought by the celebrants themselves are ample for these destitute, luckless children of the Lord—or the Buddha.
Come December 24th, the most miserable shantytowns of Bangkok will be the site for dancing, singing, and the playing of happy games. God bless us every one!
Fr. Lawrence O’Neal, SJ, is priest at St. Malachy’s, Baltimore. He visited Klong Toey as a guest of the Miracle Centre. Donations to help the centre with its work, which touches the lives of thousands every day, are welcome. Visit www.miraclecentre.th.org
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www.facebook.com/tim.jodpur.2
Tim Jodpur
Poncho Girl again in the Connect Cafe! Minus the poncho, though it’s teeming outside, as usual. She’s been here a while.
4:18 pm
Chris Leahy
Same bat time, same bat cave?
4:18 pm
Tim Jodpur
Don’t think she’s spotted me either. Place is a zoo—Thai boys are all Black Ops or Halo 4—and she’s in the next row. We’re seated back to back.
4:18 pm
Chris Leahy
You going to talk to her? Get her to give you an XXXmas present?
4:19 pm
Tim Jodpur
Shit. Chuck just came online and messaged me. Wish I’d never friended that guy. Should I add him?
4:19 pm
Chris Leahy
Yeah, whatever.
4:19 pm
Chuck Hayes was added to this conversation by Tim
Chuck Hayes
Guess who, limpdicks? Just NAIL her, Jodpur! What you waiting for? Stuff her like a turkey. What else you got going?
4:20 pm
Chris Leahy
Hate to say it, but I’m with Chuck on this. She’s prob older than she looks and is either a mixed-race local or else a backpacker who got dumped on the Asian circuit. She’s lonely and you’re horny. I bet it won’t take much sweet talk to slide her between the sheets.
4:20 pm
Tim Jodpur
Dudes, there’s something wrong. She’s been dialling the same Skype number over and over since I sat down a half hour ago.
Now she’s got her headphones off and is just slumped in her seat, nodding and blinking at the screen. I think she might have taken some meth, or yaba, the local version. Should I give her a shake, make sure she’s okay?
4:21 pm
Chris Leahy
She must have been dumped on Skype and got high to deal with the shit. Be the white knight, and that Asian Barbie doll will be yours. Hey, bet you can snap her photo now, and send it to us salivating boys.
4:22 pm
Tim Jodpur
Never mind.
4:24 pm
Chris Leahy
What U mean?
4:24 pm
Tim Jodpur
She’s gone again. Up and walked out. Left the computer open and didn’t pay for usage. The kid at the desk is deciding whether or not to go after her.
4:24 pm
Chris Leahy
You could chase instead.
4:25 pm
Tim Jodpur
Nah. Had a bad feeling. That girl is in trouble, and the trouble would come my way. I can pay for it in Soi Cowboy tonight if I need an Xmas lay so bad.
4:25 pm
Connectcafe.co.thai.24/12/20—, Computer log for guest288888884 16:16 pm http://www.google.co.th/Google : Klong Toey slum 34,100 (0.44 ) http://www.catholicage.hk.u/xmaspartyforagelesskids-thailand-slum
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Sign me in No replyTryAgain LaterNoreplyTryAgain Later(13X)
16:21 no activity
…
16:26 no activity
…
16:31 usage terminated by staff, guest288888884 delinquent account
(translated from )
Hotel Excelsior Security Log
Date: 24/12/20—
Reporting: 18:05
Employee: Som Kasemsarn, #488
Employee #488 requested to make a special entry. At 17:24 this afternoon hotel guest Kwok Xixi is spotted outside gate talking again with Klong Toey beggar. Girl, who gives her name as Somchai, is wearing red poncho, which she says was gift from Ms. Kwok. Having spoken with both girls, #488 runs into lobby to inform K. Suttikul and I. Wongsawat. On return, they are gone. Man selling cigarettes at corner, and Mr. Keetchwan, taxi driver parked at curb, both suspect they are headed to Klong Toey for the night. At 17:56 #488 shares
this information with K. Suttikul.
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BANGKOK UNLEASHED
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Bangkok Blogger
A blog about life for a farang in Krung Thep,
a.k.a. The Big Mango!
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Wednesday, December 24, 20—, 20:14 pm
UPSET IN THE EXCELSIOR—DADDY’S VERSION
Fourteen million souls in this Asian Gotham, and every one of them with a story. Even visitors usually bring a tale to tell, if asked, or if some poor boy or girl is being paid, usually while on their knees, to hear them out. On this monsoony night, the eve of the birth of the Christ child—if you’re into Christian voodoo—I was flopped in a comfy chair in the Excelsior lobby, chatting with my friend IW, a grand fromage at the hotel, when in barged a trio of Bangkok’s finest in law enforcement (!). The scene unfolded, lucky me, near the front desk, not behind any closed door, and all I had to do was pretend to be with IW, and nobody cared. (Sometimes being a foreign ghost is the perfect level of transparency.) The deal was this: a girl had gone missing from the hotel earlier today, and her dad, an overseas Chinese with faded Tony Leung smoulder and flat Yankay speech, was losing it. He looked pretty whacked out anyway—Yabba dabba doo, Fred Flintstone?—but the flight of his “darling,” as he called her, who’d apparently wandered off into the deluge with a street urchin she’d befriended, had him popping a vein in his forehead. IW had good intel—the urchin was a regular at begging foot traffic and knocking on car windows—that the girls had made tracks for deepest Klong Toey, where few upstanding Bangkokites venture, never mind any tourists out for a watery stroll. Truth be told, Bangkok Unleashed has never set a gingerly foot in the infamous KT, though we’ve heard plenty about the shit, literally, one must sometimes step around there.
Now, a teen farang going AWOL from five-star digs for a few hours, especially to slum it in the slums, and her upset, possibly meth-addled papa wouldn’t normally merit an entry in a blog dedicated to a city with such high standards in debauchery. But here’s the kicker: the police weren’t buying Daddy’s version! There’d been a problem back at the airport—IW, off the record, said she had received a call even before the “couple” turned up at the hotel on Thursday, fresh from plaguetown, a.k.a. Hong Kong, warning of a possible shady, even non-consensual arrangement—and since they’d checked in, nothing had been “normal” about the supposed parent-child holiday. Mincing no words, and obliging IW to translate into English, a senior officer with the Royal Thai Police came right out and said it—maybe Daddy was actually a pimp, or a trader, and maybe “darling” had fled her captor, and her grim destiny, for the safety of a ‘hood where he’d never find her? He spluttered and spat and, I swear, debated taking a swing at his accuser. (Don’t go there, movie star—you won’t be smouldering after a few years in a Thai prison!) Mr. Royal Thai Police, no surprise, was nonplussed. Was the girl’s passport still in their room? No, Daddy admitted, she’d taken it. Had she also taken the flip phone he’d bought her on arrival? No, she’d left the phone. And his pockets—had they been emptied of cash while he slept off his nocturnal ramble through Nana Plaza? His pockets had been emptied of cash, he said, and how the fuck did they know where he’d been the night before? (Security cameras, hello!) To summarize, said Mr. Police, this fifteen-year-old in your supposed care took her passport and all available baht, and left behind the phone that could link you to her. Sounds like a runner, he said, and good job. And you, he added, are in the kind of trouble no Canadian passport will exempt.
Kwok Ka-Shing, Bangkok Unleashed must report, did not help his own credibility much—or make this blogger doubt his diagnosis of a man on the crazy medicine—when, asked to find a recent photo of his missing daughter on a hotel laptop, he proceeded to the Facebook page of his other child, only to then require an excruciating thirty seconds to pick out his runaway from among the rows of photos of young Asian women on display. “They all kind of look the same,” he said. Pretty much everyone agreed the remark was either an admission of guilt or a very, very bad joke.
Is this story done? Not even close. According to IW—don’t be angry with me for sharing a few details; this is too dishy!—the police will be placing calls back to Hong Kong, and asking around Klong Toey, before making any arrests. More anon.
Posted by Bangkok Blogger 0 comments
Labels: Bangkok, Excelsior, Royal Thai Police,
Klong Toey, teen prostitution
www.torontotelegraph.com/news/world/thai-slum-where-Xmas-lives
[Video]
0:01 —————————————————————— 4:16
XMAS PARTY IN KLONG TOEY FOR STREET KIDS
CP Video
Published Wednesday, Dec 24, 20—, 22:10 pm (local time)
Last updated Wednesday, Dec 24, 20—, 22:10 pm
0 comments
Text (for hearing impaired):
Life in the poor neighbourhoods of Thailand’s largest city is never easy, especially for homeless children. And Klong Toey, a sprawling slum perched beneath an elevated freeway and adjacent to a canal prone to flooding, emitting raw sewage, and providing drinking water for the kind of feral—and, as it happens, eye-patched and three-legged—dog like this poor creature, may be the toughest of them all … But it is here, at the fabled Miracle Centre, which offers shelter to orphans and street kids, and to youth with AIDS, that I found a heartwarming scene. More than three hundred children of unknown parentage and long-shot prospects celebrated their “collective birthday” this evening, and it was quite a party … Father John Corrigan, the American priest who oversees the centre, explains the event: “The thing of it is, most of these children were abandoned to be raised hardscrabble and wild in a very harsh environment. They can’t even be sure of their full names, or their ages, and so it was decided to celebrate how we all are so born, really, into one huge family, with a party to be held—why not?—on Christmas Eve, which isn’t, truth be told, such a big deal for Buddhist folk.”
And what do those street kids think of eating cake and singing songs to their own uncertainty? Here’s Somchai, who believes she is thirteen, and whose limited English in no way limits her cheer: “I like party, and being with all my friend. Everyone my sister and brother.” Or this teenager who keeps Somchai close company, and earlier draped a string of white beads, the kind normally found adorning temple Buddhas, around her friend’s neck. Though she seems disoriented and declines to give her name, this striking Thai teen speaks perfect English: “It’s my birthday, almost. I miss having a mom and dad.” When asked if she recalls her parents, she answers that her mother is Filipino and her father was born in a temple in China. She also says that, although she doesn’t know how she ended up at the Miracle Centre, she is happy to be with “such nice people.” Out of such optimism, and love of life and friendship, grows something of beauty, even in Klong Toey …
END
News > Local News
BANGKOK POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING HK TEEN
Published: 25/12/20 at 00:15
Online news: Breaking story, 24 minutes ago
Royal Thai Police spokeswoman Chuleekorn Dhanarajata released a statement saying that Hong Kong resident Kwok Xixi has been missing from her hotel since mid-afternoon on December 24. Ms. Kwok, who answers to “SeeSee” or Sarah and holds a Canadian passport, is two days short of her 16th birthday. She was spotted in the district of Klong Toey at approximately 8 p.m. last evening, and captured on camera by a Canadian journalist covering a party for street children.
Speaking to reporters, Constable Dhanarajata added that, beyond the statement, she wished to affirm the police’s satisfaction with the status of the missing girl’s father, Kwok Ka-Shing, despite an encounter, reported in the Post Online, at Suvarnabhumi Airport earlier this week. “Having investigated, the police are now convinced that Mr. Kwok and his daughter are in Thailand for a simple holiday, and to escape th
e difficult situation with the latest SARS crisis in Hong Kong,” the constable said. Speaking on behalf of both parents, she added that anyone who finds the child should be aware that, due to an existing medical condition, she may not be fully cognizant of her surroundings, or of recent events. “She is a good girl, and her family wishes only for her safe return.”
Your comments:
Viewfromkhaosan
25/12/20— at 00:58
Didn’t I say it before—another girl lost in B-Kok, and raw meat for the carrion birds we call a tourism industry. Kwok Ka-Shing, hang your head in shame! 2 people liked / 20 people disliked this comment
redmeatboy
25/12/20— at 00:59
Yummy! And don’t forget—we carrion birds can smell fresh meat from a slum away
84 people liked / 26 people disliked this comment
PART III
John B
At long last, the sky is hosanna blue and not a cloud up there. The air feels washed, the overlay of a hill country morning—eucalyptus, magnolia, lemongrass, and rose petal—besting the stinks that lurk beneath, but usually don’t stay down. Include sewage and exhaust fumes, fried garlic and nam pla on any list. Plus an all-pervasive rot, some of it actual jungle but most manmade, and not from dying. Today, though, promises magnolia and rose petal, clean air and clear sky.
Or so the day will unfold at the shelter, vows John B, standing at the table chopping peppers, the blade a slaughterhouse executioner. So help him Mother Ginger. At her own insistence, after all, is the Safe Shelter compound in On Klang village, Mae On District, Chiang Mai Province, a sanctuary designed to keep outsiders out and insiders in plain sight. The three-metre fence is chain-link, not brick, ensuring maximum protection for those within its square hectare but minimum privacy—also by design. The same goes for the wall-less kitchen where he presently stands, visible to anyone passing on the street, and the equally open classrooms to one side and dining hall to the other. Only the twin dormitories, running off the main building, are permitted walls and windows, though doors have no locks, including his own. Never again, the old woman vowed when outlining her plans for the new facility seven years ago, and mysteriously welcoming reprobate John Barlow onto an otherwise Sheila staff, would terrible things be done to children behind brick walls or locked doors. John B agreed then and still agrees now, and certainly the girls themselves, close to terror-free for the first time in their young lives, thrill to the openness, the breezes blowing through and the rains slanting in, waves of birdsong and flotillas of butterflies, lizards hanging off the walls at night and the occasional snake at sunrise. Mother Ginger died twenty months ago. Could her original vigilance, along with his own fervour since replacing her as boss, actually keep out those primal stinks, the ones perpetually lurking below? He’d be a right fool if he believed that possible.