Authors: Charles Foran
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
Skype Name [email protected] Password problems signing in?
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.
Sign off
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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.