Three decades ago in a cordoned-off corner of the developing world an angry Catholic priest armed only with pencil, paper, and crayons, declared a revolution. From a shanty school shared with Buddhists and Muslims in Bangkok's squatter slums, Father Joe Maier began his advance on abject poverty. Today, his Human Development Foundation and Mercy Centre charity is responsible for thirty-two preschools that have taught more than twenty thousand children how to read and write. Despite the crippling neglect found in impoverishment, he is raising international scholars and injecting a sense of purpose into shantytowns and squatter camps that used to have neither.
Greg Barrett is a twenty-year veteran of wire and newspapers (you remember those -- the rolled up thing tossed on your driveway or stoop). Prior to writing The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok, he was a gypsy print journalist working everywhere from smalltown Loris, S.C. (earning less than $10,000 and squatting rent-free in a N. Myrtle Beach lifeguard house) to Augusta, Ga. (helped cover three Masters and shot fortysomething over par on The Augusta National course) to Rock Hill, S.C., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md., and Honolulu, Hawaii (a haole assigned to report on Native Hawaiian Affairs, and later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by faculty at the Hawaiians-only Kamehameha Schools).
In 2000, Barrett was a wire service reporter in the Gannett News Service/USA Today Washington bureau when he met Father Joe Maier after being sent to Thailand to report on sex trafficking. Surprised by the magnanimous Bangkok charity that lit an otherwise dark corner of the world, Barrett returned five years later to find out why the poor, abandoned, abused and, frequently, HIV-infected children at Father Joe's Mercy Centre hopped and skipped and whistled and played at a clip faster than the children in his own relatively affluent cul-de-sac outside of Washington, D.C.
The Gospel of Father Joe is his first nonfiction book. He's currently at work on two others.
