Dear Everyone,

We opened four new schools in just the past few months!

This announcement may not seem like groundbreaking Mercy Centre news. After all, we currently operate 23 preschools and have opened and operated well over 50 schools at one time or another in the past 40 years.

Greetings for Christmas. Our five- and six-year-old kids invented this glorious dance step all on their own. It’s a kind of a jump-up-and-down thing, which they do until they get tired and then collapse on the floor in laughter and giggles. And then they catch their collective breath, and do it again. They said if baby Jesus lived here at Mercy Centre with them, they’d teach him, too.

Beneath the luxury condominiums in Bangkok, often right beside the glitzy shopping malls, you will sometimes come across a guarded, gated camp of corrugated tin shacks. These camps are for the migrant workers, mostly from Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, who come to Thailand to build high rise towers for a minimum daily wage. We operate schools on these sites for the children living in the camps. These shacks and our schools are the children’s entire universe.

Here is a follow up notice about the flash fire that struck our neighborhood this past September. Before the fire was put out, seven homes were severely damaged; four homes were completely destroyed; fifty-one people were left homeless.

A four-year-old breaks with tradition at her mother's cremation, but for a change no one really minds.

Published by Bangkok Post, Sunday Spectrum Section, Nov. 16, 2014.

By Father Joe Maier, C.Ss.R.

Today we celebrated the Loy Krathong holiday in our 23 kindergartens. According to tradition, we float our Krathongs (small vessels that contain our worries, troubles, sins, etc.) down a river. But since no river flows through our kindergarten playgrounds, we used inflatable plastic pools. Our school children were happy, even without a river. To them it's all magic!