Communiqué
Jesus in Thailand
The Christian Asylum Seekers of Bangkok
I confess I'm not one for exotic vacations. Before we were married, I joked with my wife that I would be perfectly happy to go on a mission trip to some unchurched land for our honeymoon; she, being the more reasonable one, wasn't so thrilled with the idea. The very last thing I wanted was to sit on some Caribbean beach, casually sipping daiquiris and wasting away the hours in some otherwise poverty-stricken country.
It's highly ironic, then, that my family recently returned home from a three-year stay in Thailand, ground zero for exotic beach destinations in Southeast Asia, with its pristine, warm-to-the-touch, cerulean waters, its cheap yet delicious cuisine, and its effusively welcoming hospitality industry. Since returning to the United States, we have often been asked by friends or acquaintances what we liked best about Thailand. Surely its vacation spots, food, or foreign culture is the expected answer. So they are taken aback when I tell them the best thing about Bangkok is its predominantly Christian asylum-seeker community.
A Haven for Asylum Seekers
I was entirely unaware that the Asian metropolis had such a community when my family arrived in the summer of 2014. Like most expats who move to Thailand, we had been told to expect sky bars, spicy food, and some of the best beaches in the world just a short jaunt away. We bought a car with the expectation of taking weekend excursions south to Pattaya or Hua Hin, or northward to the elephant-populated national parks. But our very first Sunday at the Catholic parish nearest to our residence exposed us to a very different expat experience.
In a city like Bangkok, one would expect to see a diverse, multinational crowd at any downtown church. There were large numbers of Thais at the church we attended, but also many Westerners, Filipinos, and Africans, and a significant minority of South Asians as well. I introduced myself to one who was distributing bulletins in the outdoor vestibule. He was from Pakistan—as were the other fifteen members of his family, natives of the megalopolis of Karachi who had fled persecution at the hands of Muslim extremists.
His name was Wilson, and we quickly developed a friendship, his humble and gracious personality—and that of his family—being spiritually magnetic. As my family and his became friends, we learned remarkable details regarding their exodus story. They had been a large, well-respected, middle-class Catholic family in Karachi. Wilson and his wife were both registered nurses; his brother was a medical doctor.
Trouble started when Pashtun migrants—the same ethnicity as the Taliban who dominate the westernmost provinces of the country—began to harass Wilson's family. They falsely accused his brother of desecrating a Koran, an offense that often triggers mob violence. The brother fled the country. Two nieces were then abducted and set on fire. I can attest to the veracity of their story: they showed me the burn marks on their torsos. A sister was threatened, went into hiding, and was never heard from again, presumably abducted or killed. So Wilson, with the aid of his bishop, acquired passports for his entire family and took a one-way flight to Bangkok.
Why Bangkok? Because, for more than a decade, the city has been known as a haven for asylum seekers and refugees from across Asia and Africa. Precisely because its economy relies so heavily upon tourism, Thailand has maintained a notoriously relaxed entry policy: visitors can easily acquire a 30-day visa upon arrival. Those same visitors can quite effortlessly overstay their visa without attracting much attention from the Thai authorities. Thus, all manner of people—from religious and ethnic minorities to political dissidents to economic migrants—have made their way to Thailand. Many are from Pakistan, but I also met people from Burma, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Soviet republics of central Asia.
Ecumenism in Charity at the IDC
For many, including Wilson's family, getting into the country is just the first step in the long and arduous process of obtaining official refugee status. Once the Wilsons made friends at church willing to help them find housing, they applied for such status to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This process can take years, with the very real possibility that one's application will be rejected in the end, in which case there is little choice but to return home. In the interim, one is deemed an "asylum seeker," meaning that he has no formal legal status in the host country, and thus is entirely subject to the whims of the local police and security services. In this respect, Wilson's family are some of the lucky ones—they have never been apprehended by the Thai police and taken to the infamous International Detention Center, or IDC.
Casey Chalk is a graduate of UVA and a student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College, Front Royal, Virginia. He is also an editor for the ecumenical website Called to Communion (www.calledtocommunion.com)
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