Bangkok's Korczak

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T

HE “CHILDREN’S COURT” ATthe Mercy Center orphanage is in

session. Squatting on the floor of adorm room, the five dozen residents

of Home 6 are gathered to decide on

the appropriate punishment for a 9-year-old girlaccused of stealing a friend’s brightly coloredkeepsake pocketbook.

“Let’s cut off her hand,” a Muslim boy sug-gests, eliciting a giggle among Buddhist chil-dren. “Let’s take away her pocket money for a

week,” another child counters more charitably.“Have her clean the bathrooms,” a third opines.

Hands are raised in a vote and the childrenimpose the latter penalty on the culprit. “I just wanted to have a diary,”

the girl apologizes, before she makes amends with the pocketbook’sowner, embracing her. Justice served, play then resumes merrily before

bedtime lights-out.

Joseph H. Maier, aka Father Joe, is pleased. “The Children’s Court,isn’t that wonderful!” he says. Maier is a Catholic priest whose fourdecades of good works on behalf of orphans, street kids and abusedchildren in a notorious Bangkok slum has earned him a reputation as a

boisterous saint. “Let the children make their own decisions,” heexplains. “Let them be wrong, but love them and forgive them – that’s

from Janusz Korczak.”A Polish Jewish pedagogue who perished in the Holocaust may

seem an unlikely inspiration for a Redemptorist priest from rural NorthDakota living in Buddhist Thailand. Yet Maier regards Korczak, nee

Henryk Goldszmit, as a spiritual mentor. The Warsaw-born orphanagedirector’s ideas about childcare and street kid outreach have had a for-mative influence on the Catholic priest, whose Mercy Center provides

shelter and care to the neediest young souls in the hardscrabble neigh-

borhood of Klong Toey. The three-story building, constructed with agenerous foreign donation, houses a 200-child orphanage, preschoolsfor 480 tots, a center for the handicapped, an AIDS hospice, a credit

union for penniless single mothers, and a legal aid center for abused andtrafficked children.

It also has the Janusz Korczak School of Southeast Asia. Inspired byKorczak’s modus operandi that no child, however disadvantaged, is alost cause, the school provides free tuition and individually designed

curricula to children with special needs who cannot be integrated intogovernment-run schools and to street kids who can’t afford school or

played truant. “What about the children no one else wants?” Father

Maier explains the school’s raison d’être, near wall-hangings of por-

traits of Korczak circa mid-1930s. They show the pediatrician as a baldman, usually wearing round steel-rimmed spectacles, with careworn

features and a goatee lending him a touch of Don Quixote.

Born in 1878 into a prominent Jewish family, Korczak was anindomitable idealist. The doctor, himself the product of a broken home,wrote popular children’s books in Polish, pioneered modern childrenpedagogy and authored the world’s first “Declaration of Children’s

Rights” (available in Thai at the Mercy Center). He chose death inTreblinka alongside his orphaned charges in August 1942 rather than

flee from the Warsaw Ghetto, where he had relocated his orphanageafter the Nazis’ invasion of Poland. “Janusz Korczak was a hero, but

more than a mere hero,” Maier notes. “He would never abandon hischildren, and neither will we abandon ours.”

The launch in 2004 of the eponymous school, on the top floor of theMercy Center’s administrative building opposite the orphanage, wasattended by Israel’s ambassador to Thailand. The embassy has since

facilitated performances by visiting Israeli musicians for children at the

orphanage and brought in an Israeli child-development specialist for ateacher-training seminar at Mercy schools.

“IT SEEMS LIKE WE’RE ALWAYS FIGHTING THEauthorities,” Maier fumes, referring to intransigent bureaucrats

who, he says, sideline troubled kids rather than try to motivateand integrate them. “I understand their funny little rules,” he grumbles,“but damn those rules.” During the priest’s walkabout on the zigzagging

breezeways of the Mercy Center with its airy dorms, bustling kinder-gartens and well-equipped AIDS wards, bubbly boys and girls emerge

from left and right to tap fists gently with their guardian in mischievous

THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 13, 200926

JEWISH WORLD

Bangkok’s Korczak

Tibor Krausz Bangkok

A Catholic priest in

the slums of the Thaicapital puts into practicethe teachings ofPolish Jewish pedagogueJanusz Korczak

MENTOR: Father Joe Maier poses with his charges at Bangkok’s Janusz Korczak School

beside a portrait of the Jewish educator

T I B OR K RA US Z



THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 13, 2009 27

camaraderie. “So now we have the Korczak School for these children[no one wants or who can’t fit in],” he adds.

A paunchy, youthful 70-year-old with an avuncular disposition anda mercurial temperament alternating between F-worded outbursts and

doubled-up hilarity, the Irishman is an outspoken fellow who doesn’tmince words whether he discusses wanton teenage pregnancy or “stu-

pid rules” by the Holy See. He’s upfront with all comers, be they

delinquent slum dwellers or former U.S. president George W. Bush,who visited the priest’s Mercy Center last August during a stopover inBangkok.

Maier, a man seemingly oblivious to creature comforts who slept in

a tumbledown squatter’s shack near a municipal sewage pump in thesqualid Bangkok district of Klong Toey before moving recently to a

shady bungalow at the Mercy Center, is a one-man goodwill institution.His relentless charity drive reaches across Bangkok’s crowded shanty-

towns from his base at the “Slaughterhouse,” a squatter town notoriousfor its endemic poverty, violent crime and rampant substance abuse.

Maier’s Human Development Foundation runs 31 preschools for over4,000 poor children, many of whose parents are functionally illiterate.He’s also put up myriad playgrounds and spon-

sored afterschool soccer teams in grim shanty-

towns.His Mercy Center, staffed mainly by local

Buddhists, runs a street child outreach to save

kids from the mean streets and to enroll themin the Korczak School. Currently, the school

has 27 students from 8- to 17-year-olds. It alsooffers adult education courses in the evenings.“In this school, children can learn to read and

write,” Maier says, while jocularly banteringwith girls offering him freshly baked cakes

produced in the school’s cooking class, whichhe added to the curriculum when he realized many street kids had

poor homemaking skills. “Reading and writing,” he adds, “that’s a

whole new world, isn’t it!”For Motdam, it certainly is. The girl, whose name means “black ant,” is 14, but still reads and writes haltingly at a second-grade level.

Her impoverished rice farmer parents sent her from the family’s homein the country’s northeastern boondocks to what they thought would bea better life with her widowed grandma in a Bangkok slum. There she

languished unschooled and unattended, an easy target for unscrupulousdrug peddlers and sex traffickers.

Now she lives at the Mercy Center’s orphanage and studies in itsKorczak School. “I didn’t like normal school because it was too hard for

me,” Motdam, a shy girl with burgeoning femininity, says in theschool’s foyer. In it a tableau of sepias chronicles stages from the life of

Korczak and his orphans in prewar Poland. “Here the teachers are kindand gentle and help me a lot,” she adds.

Newh is also 14. By her age she should be entering high school,but she’s still in second grade. Her single mom, who ekes out a liv-ing doing odd manual jobs, couldn’t afford to keep her in school, but

now Newh can study again. “Arjan farang [foreign teacher] fromPoland,” she explains, referring to Korczak and a distant land she

can’t place on a map, “helped street boys and girls like us learn toread and write.”

Maier’s mantra to street children – one he learned from his hard-working single mother and which mirrors Korczak’s own philosophy –is, “No matter what, go to school, go to school, go to school!”

After being shunned in his old primary school because he’s HIV-

positive, 12-year-old Bank is back in school – the Korczak School,where he enjoys doing basic science experiments. “Dr. Janusz always

helped children and cared for them,” says the boy, who learned of thedoctor’s life from “Korczak,” a Polish biopic by Andrzej Wajda, shown

to students. He adds earnestly, “He was like Father Joe.”

THE PRIEST PRAYS FOR CHILDREN, BUT HE DOESN’T

proselytize to them. “Religion should be taught by grandmoth-ers,” Maier insists. “What we must teach kids is to be good.” The

three cardinal sins for children, he believes, are laziness, theft and dis-honesty. “If these children grow up [thinking] ‘God loves me. I don’t

cheat, steal, lie.’ Hey, that’s pretty good,” he says. His views echo thatof the Jewish educator, who argued that despite their prerogative to mis-

chief, children do “not have the right to lie, deceive, [or] steal.”Maier bristles at fellow Catholics like British Bishop Richard

Williamson, who publicly denied the Holocaust recently, attesting tolingering anti-Semitism in some quarters of the Church. “Stupid. How

horrible,” Maier fumes at the mere mention of such views. “In all reli-gions we have the same friends – mercy, kindness, goodness. We have

the same enemies, too – hatred, killing, preju-

dice.”

“Father Joe has a very open attitude towardall faiths,” stresses Michael Simms, a Jewishvolunteer at the Mercy Center.

For the fifth year running, Simms, a retiredfire captain from San Jose, California, and his

wife, Deborah, have spent a month every yearhelping out at the priest’s orphanage under theaegis of the American Jewish World Service’s

volunteer program. He teaches woodworkingskills to boys from the Korczak School in a

workshop he set up five years ago for the kidsto learn “marketable skills.” Deborah edits fundraising material and

teaches in the orphanage’s preschools.

“It sounds very goody-goody,” says the fireman, who volunteered atthe Tel Aviv Fire Department in 2004 out of solidarity with Israel dur-ing the second intifada. “But there’s more to life than shaving a scoreoff your golf stroke.”

He prefers to shave wood chips off desks, tables and chairs. Many of the Mercy Center’s benches, shoe racks, bookshelves, even Maier’s

deckchairs, have been produced in Simms’s little woodshop, tuckedbehind a boys’ plywood dormitory, where he teaches a dozen kids at a

time. His apprentices, aged between 8 and 14, range from reformedjuvenile delinquents to a hilltribe kid rescued from begging on Bangkok

streets. “One very hot afternoon one of the boys bought me a Pepsi,”Simms recalls. “To him the price of a Pepsi is a considerable expense

and it meant more to me than a gold Rolex watch.”The Jewish couple’s latest volunteer stint came to an end in

February, but they’ve already booked a flight to Bangkok for nextDecember. “We have two families now – one in California and one hereat the Mercy Center,” Deborah Simms says. “You look at someone like

Father Joe and go ‘Wow!’” her husband says. “It’s a privilege just to bearound him.” She adds, laughing: “We’re his token Jews.”

John Padorr, who formerly worked in advertising in Chicago, andhas been a volunteer at the Mercy Center for a decade, is also Jewish.

Padorr, whom Maier greets with an amicable “Yes, holy man” one after-noon, is a trusted aide and confidante of the priest. The American hasbeen an indefatigable advocate of the Korczak School since its found-

ing five years ago. “The Janusz Korczak School and everything we do

‘The positive energy of

Janusz Korczak lives on,

no matter what your

religion may be’

– Father Joseph Maier



THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 13, 200928

JEWISH WORLD

directly related to Korczak,” Padorr explains, “have come aboutbecause everything Korczak did is close to Father Joe’s heart.”

NO STRANGER TO POVERTY AND SQUALOR,Korczak might have felt at home on Maier’s turf in Rong Mu,or the “Slaughterhouse,” a cheek-by-jowl shantytown home to

a multiethnic community of 125,000 souls. They’re squeezed into a 5-square-kilometer squatters’ ghetto between a bustling port on the ChaoPhraya River and the cement pillars of an elevated expressway plied bythe shiny new cars of the more fortunate beside giant billboards plug-ging multimillion-baht ($1 = 36 baht) condos.

Beneath the stifling canopy of corrugated iron roofs, locals dwell intumbledown shacks on stilts connected with rickety catwalks totteringover filthy, toxic canals. Many a ramshackle abode has been jerry-rigged from the scrap wood of pigpens for livestock once brought hereto be butchered at dawn for city markets.

Substance abuse is rampant in the Slaughterhouse, and so is crime,most of it left unsolved. Residents, in Maier’s words, “lock their doorsagainst things that go bump in the night.” Not that it may be safer indoors.Domestic violence is widespread and childhood innocence is lost earlyhere to abusive elders or the need to survive. Young children are oftentrafficked or used as “horse walkers,” forced to peddle cheap speed tabletsof methamphetamine laced with caffeine known as yaba, or “crazy pill.”

Maier points to three identical 11-year-old girls in a gaggle of play-ful children in the leafy courtyard of the Mercy Center. The orphaned

triplets were offered for sale as domestic slaves at age three by theirdrunken grandfather. When the priest got wind of the man’s intent, he“bought” the girls himself for two crates of whiskey and brought themto his Mercy Center, where they have lived safely since.

“This here is Master Ohh,” Maier then says, indicating a 6-year-oldboy scampering around barefoot with a slight limp. “Dad is a nightwatchman who fell on his son in a drunken rage with a machete,”almost severing the boy’s legs at both ankles. Until Ohh was nursedback to health, he was sometimes carted around in a red toy wagon by“Cookie Crumb James,” a 9-year-old HIV-positive “throwaway dead-end kid,” in Maier’s words, with a scarred face, a lopsided grin and a

sweet tooth (which earned him the nickname).Ever on the prowl in the Slaughterhouse,

HIV/AIDS often finds new hosts already inmothers’ wombs. “These girls all have AIDS,”Maier notes as three healthy-looking 12-year-olds with pageboy haircuts come to greet himwith a polite wai, followed by the in-group fist

tap. “How long are they going to last? I don’tknow.” he adds. “But while they’re with us, theyhave the right to go to school and have a normallife.”

In this too, Maier’s sentiments reflectKorczak’s. In his pioneering “Declaration of Children’s Rights” (which predated the U.N.’sDeclaration of Human Rights by decades), theorphanage director insisted that even childrenwho may die prematurely have the right to a fulllife of experience. At the Catholic priest’sorphanage, children with HIV/AIDS, whoaccount for a quarter of the 200 or so young res-idents, lead normal lives. They eat, sleep and

play among their healthy peers and study in thesame schools. Elsewhere, they might well be

shunned as pariahs, relegated to the outer margins of social life whilebeing left to languish in sickbeds. “You see, Janusz Korczak’s childrenhad to suffer from the Nazis,” Maier notes. “Many of our children haveto endure another deadly scourge – AIDS.”

In his years at the slums of Klong Toey, Maier has buried hundredsof children and their parents who succumbed to the ravages of the awfulvirus. Many deaths leave him with searing memories. On one occasionthe priest sobbed at the Buddhist cremation of a garbage scavenger whodied “3 baht in debt” because of his pushcart’s 10 baht (30 cents) dailyrental fee with only 7 baht in his pockets that day, leaving three desti-tute orphans behind in the Mercy Center orphanage. On another occa-

sion Maier obeyed the last wish of a dying little girl to get her a new pairof shoes so she wouldn’t have to go to heaven barefoot.“I have no power over life and death, do I,” he says somberly, his

freckled brow furrowed, his arms folded over his Santa belly stretchinghis off-white polo shirt into a melon shape. “You deal with reality here,”he adds. “Children teach you how to laugh, how to live, how to die. Look at that girl over there. She’s not well, you see, but she dances and shedraws.”

He spots a heap of children immersed in drawing and games, theirlimbs entwined in brotherly embrace inside a breezy playroom, andFather Joe’s mood lifts. “This, my brother, is how it’s supposed to be,”he says, visibly pleased. “Life’s never gonna be the same withoutmommy and daddy, but this is neat, isn’t it!”

At dawn, before another day of toil for “the poorest of the poor,”

Maier unwinds in a nearby park. Within sight of local tai-chi practition-ers, he cleanses himself of festering heartaches and nagging worriesthrough his private brand of ritualized breathing exercise. He recites thename of Israel’s God. “Yah-weh.” The priest breathes in on the first syl-lable and out on the second. “Yah-weh.” “Yahweh must guide all of us,”Maier explains. “You become a teacher of Judaism by being a goodman. So I try to be the same way.”

Maier continues to draw inspiration from his Jewish alter ego. “Thepositive energy of Janusz Korczak lives on, no matter what your reli-gion may be,” says the priest. “He’s in heaven and we’ve asked him tobless our children and protect them.” •

JEWISH VOLUNTEERS: Deborah and Michael Simms, from San Jose, California with Thai

orphans – ‘there’s more to life than shaving a score off your golf stroke’

T I B OR K RA US Z

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Bangkok's Korczak