One woman helped children stay in school and fed the babies and the elderly of Bangkok’s largest slum. Thousands of people, on her own.

The work

Milk Run. Sister Joan started the Milk Run in 1992, when many newborns in the slum were not surviving their first year. Registered babies get a box of milk formula every 2 weeks for 12 months. At its peak in the 2000s, 180 babies were registered at any time. Since 1992 that has added up to about 95,000 boxes of formula for more than 3,500 babies and their mothers.

Rice Run. After years of helping individual households, Sister Joan started the Rice Run in 2002 as a group effort. Every February senior and handicapped recipients are registered to receive a food parcel for a year. Every fortnight each one collects 5kg of rice, cooking oil, fish sauce and dried pork. For most of those years Sister Joan registered 120 households; today it is about 60. Since 2002, roughly 60,000 food parcels have been handed out.

School Run. Education is at the heart of the Presentation Sisters’ work. In 2019 we added the School Run to help registered students continue their studies and complete a degree at Thai universities. Six students have graduated so far, and four more are studying at universities in Bangkok.

These three runs are what remains of something much larger. For twenty years, every Tuesday, hundreds of children lined the narrow streets of Rong Moo community to collect bus fares and lunch money so they could stay in school the next week. Sister Joan also paid for uniforms, late electricity bills, a house rebuilt. Every baht was recorded, and every item went to a registered person.

She never raised the money. There was no time, and no internet. Before Bangkok she had been a teacher in Western Australia, and her former students, by then running companies and working around the world, heard that their teacher was helping the poor. They started sending money, and kept sending it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars arrived this way every year, for years. Unasked. That support carried the mission for a quarter of a century. When the funds finally ran out, a few years after Sister Joan returned to Perth, the Presentation Sisters, her own order, took up the cost of the runs so that her work would not stop. They carry it still, with occasional events sponsored by individual donors and the volunteers who have kept showing up to help, week after week.

Sister Joan did not begin with any of that. She began by noticing that babies were dying and doing what she could to change that. Most of us will never move into a slum, but all of us can see the needs, address some of them and return. And the kindness we show has a way of coming back, often from people we touched long ago.