Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

Brought to America as a child victim of human trafficking, Pornchai Moontri was deported to Thailand 36 years later. This is his progress in a life starting over.

July 21, 2021

In the photo above, Pornchai Moontri, Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, and Pornchai's Thai language teacher, Mea Thim Chalathip, escape the heat after a day of recollection with the Bangkok Oblates of Mary Immaculate community.

Editor’s Note: This is Pornchai Moontri’s second post since his arrival in Thailand in February, 2021. His most recent was “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!” These are no longer “guest posts.” Beyond These Stone Walls is now Pornchai’s home away from home.

+ + +

To all my friends Beyond These Stone Walls, Sawasdee Kup! That is the traditional Thai greeting. I am writing to you from just a few kilometers north of the City of Bangkok, Thailand. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krung Thep meaning, “City of Angels.” (I’m not kidding! It was called that even before I got here!)

Father Gordon MacRae and I have been talking about another post from me. It is not easy for me to write because there is too much to say to fit in one post. I will send this to Father G first so he can fix it up a little. I am struggling right now between multiple confusing languages, but I will tell you more about that in a minute.

What someone wrote about Beyond These Stone Walls being sort of my “home away from home” makes me smile. It is a long time since I had a home. I told Father G once that the only place I remember feeling “at home” was in a prison cell with him for 15 years. A lot has happened since the day I said that. I left Concord, New Hampshire where I last saw Father G on September 8, 2020. The five months after that were spent in ICE detention while waiting for deportation. That was really awful and I will tell you more about it. In the five months since my arrival here, I have mostly just felt overwhelmed.

Father G wrote about the day I left in a very moving post, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.” It tells the story of how, through my Godfather, the late Pierre Matthews, Padre Pio became one of our two patron saints. I will never forget the morning I left that Father G wrote about in that post. When I arrived in Thailand, I read in tears about the rest of Father Gordon’s first day without me.

I want to tell you about all the challenges I face now. Just like the local news, I will start with the weather. Thailand is south of the Tropic of Cancer and stretches down the Malay Peninsula almost to the Equator. After 36 years of my life a lot farther north on the far side of the world in Maine and New Hampshire, the tropical heat of Thailand is at the top of my list of things that take some getting used to.

On the day I am writing this in July it is 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and very humid. Converting to Celsius has not been easy. I am used to the other scale, so I never know what the temperature is. The choices are hot, very hot, and sizzling. The air conditioner where I live broke down a few weeks ago so I have been making do with a fan. While trying to write this, I shivered when I got my bill for a new air conditioner — 26,000 Thai baht — which thankfully turned out to be only $800. Whew!

Handling money has been another challenge. For 29 years in prison in America, I never even saw money. There is not much in the way of practical living skills that are taught to prisoners, most of whom end up with no idea of what things cost. In Thailand, that adjustment has been doubled. The Thai unit of money is the "baht," and the rate of exchange varies from week to week. Right now one U.S. dollar equals about 32 Thai baht. I was shocked once when dinner in a Thai restaurant cost 256 baht, but turned out to be only $8.00.

Technologically Challenged

Another big adjustment has been the metric system. As most of you know, I was taken from Thailand sort of traumatically at age eleven. A long and winding road brought me back at age 47 with only shadowy memories of Thailand and the people left behind here, and no memory at all of the metric system.

Father G once wrote about an episode of Family Guy in which Stuey went back to school as an adult. When the teacher handed out a math test, the students reached into their desks for calculators. But Stuey pulled out an Asian boy and poked him with his pencil saying, “Do Math. Do Math.” I am naturally good at math so whenever someone asked for help, Father G would poke me with a pencil saying, “Do math!” I was proud of the fact that I usually had the answers even before Father G could turn on his calculator.

But now the constant conversions are a way bigger math test. I walk around with calculations blazing through my mind to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and the English system to metric. This is second on my “big adjustment” list. There are no longer inches or feet or miles, no ounces or quarts or gallons, not even pounds or tons. I lost a lot of weight in my five months in ICE. I started off at 195 pounds. Now I weigh 80 kilograms. When I work out I used to bench press 360 pounds. Now I can only manage 165 kilos.

With help, I have been learning to drive here which is also a double adjustment. I never drove a car, of course, in the 29 years I was in a U.S. prison (15 of them with Father G). Learning to drive now means learning it in reverse of what I had known. Thailand drives on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. I have had a lot of help with this so far, and for that I am thankful.

But nothing is as big a challenge as technology. Father G used to joke that we will be like techno-cavemen when we leave prison. After 36 years away from my homeland and 29 years in prison, everything I do or touch is new to me. When I arrived, I had to spend 14 days in a Bangkok Holiday Inn, a period of Covid-19 quarantine required by the Thai government. Our friends here left me a really cool Samsung smart phone so I could communicate with Father G and others. I had never in my life used or even seen a smart phone.

Father G marveled at how fast I learned how to use the phone, but it was a matter of survival. I felt so alone and stranded that I spent my first night in Thailand in the hotel room finding and exploring Beyond These Stone Walls for the first time. I watched the two-hour Video Documentary Interview with Father G. It was wonderful and comforting to see and hear my friend and spiritual father again.

Father G is still behind those stone walls, and that makes me sad, but we talk for about a half hour every day by telephone. He calls me at 9:00 PM which is 8:00 AM the next morning for me. That also takes some getting used to. I am up before 6:00 AM each day which is 7:00 PM the night before for Father G. I spend the first two hours of each day working out. I have found this to be very important for my physical, mental and even spiritual well-being. So my first investment in Thailand was a weight set, mats and power bench. Father G helped me to purchase it. He calls each day right at the end of my workout.

Using the phone app on his GTL tablet, he calls me from the cell where we once both lived, and where he lives still. GTL allows internet-based calls from prison to Thailand at a cost of about 96 Thai baht for thirty minutes. That is about three U.S. dollars. It is not a big expense. Even after ten months since I left Concord, this is still an important part of my day and Father G’s.

I sometimes get impatient with myself, but Father G reminds me that I “just got here.” I feel as though I should be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I do anything or go anywhere. The name, Thailand, means “Land of the Free,” but even that became part of my adjustment. I often have to remind myself that I am free. Few of the people around me understand this. The list of adjustments goes on and on but I guess I am the last to notice my progress.

The late Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, was a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Faustina. He interviewed Pornchai and Fr. Gordon in prison.

Suffering and Divine Providence

As most readers know, I became a Catholic in 2010 due to living with an extreme example of what that means. My journey to the Catholic faith was centered around Father G and Divine Mercy. I learned about Divine Mercy thanks to him and to my friendship with Father Michael Gaitley, Felix Carroll, and Eric Mahl. The Catholic League president, Dr. Bill Donohue, also had a hand in this.

Father Gaitley invited me to become a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. Felix Carroll drew me into the Association of Marian Helpers, and wrote about me in a chapter in his book, Loved, Lost, Found. Bill Donohue gave me honorary membership in the Catholic League, and also wrote about me several times. Father G and I joined St. Maximilian’s Militia of the Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross. It is a lot to take in, and all of it very much influenced my faith journey. Divine Providence was another matter. I never understood it until I found myself face to face with it.

Father G says it is hard to believe that I have been gone for ten months. I have actually been in Thailand for only five months. The other five were spent in ICE which he has written about. (See “ICE Finally Cracks! Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”) The five long months awaiting deportation in ICE detention were a terrible ordeal, but for me and Father G it turned into a story of Divine Providence. I did not understand that at all until Father G and I had a phone conversation about it. Here is what I learned.

When a person has been deprived of good things in life, like parents, family, safety, a home, acceptance, love, freedom, even at times food and shelter, then the bad things in life become normal. When I was handed over to ICE and became buried in another overcrowded prison with total strangers in Jenna, Louisiana, all I could think of was all the good things I once had. I began to feel that I lost them all. Trust was the first thing I lost.

Father G saw to it that I had numbers to call no matter where I was. It took time for him to find me and be able to speak to me. Thanks to Claire Dion in Maine, a way was devised for us to speak each day even for a few minutes. The promised ICE flight to Thailand was delayed again and again for weeks and then months. I began to despair because of the awful circumstances in which I was living. I could not have made it through this if not for Father G.

By the fifth month of my detention, my call to Father G became routine. I was bitterly thinking that the delays will never end and he would say to me the same thing every day: “The day will come when you will walk out of there to a new life.” At first I was clinging to that, and then I started to no longer believing it. Each day, we both prayed deeply for an end to this suffering. Father G challenged me to try to help others. I did try.

Over the last eleven years since my conversion, Father G and I worked hard to come up with a plan for my future survival once we knew that I would one day be sent back to Thailand. In my mind, it was all like a big black hole. All I knew was America, and all I really knew about America was its prisons. The promise of Heaven for someone who has only known Hell can feel empty and too far beyond reach. I blocked out any expectation of good things because of my past experiences of bitter disappointment.

Then one day, in my daily call from ICE, Father G dropped a bomb with great reluctance. He told me that our plan for housing and support that we had spent years building suddenly fell apart. The founder of Divine Mercy Thailand, the man who was to take me in and give me a home, fell critically ill and was hospitalized. I prayed daily for him, but he passed away. In my mind, this was a crushing blow.

Father G did not want any surprises so he told me all of this. He said he did not want me to hear of this from anyone else. For me, it seemed as though all hope had gone out of the world. Then Yela, our Bangkok friend from the Divine Mercy apostolate, told Father G in an email that Father John Hung Le from the Missionary Society of the Divine Word had been reading about us and offered his home to me. My strongest feeling was that I did not want to be a burden for anyone, but my choices were gone.

Father G said that when everything we hope for feels gone, the only task left is trust. Father John turned out to be a very good priest and a very great friend. He is also a carpenter so we have a lot in common. He has become a good friend to Father G as well.

Some of Father John’s community and friends rallied around me when I arrived. Mea Thim, a retired Thai language teacher, began to tutor me daily in Thai language studies and has been very patient with me. She is also teaching me to drive and to acclimate to Thailand. Not having even heard Thai spoken in 36 years, and having never learned to read or write Thai, my progress feels slow but others say I am improving right on track.

Thailand is now in the middle of another strict shutdown due to a new Covid variant outbreak from India. Father G just told me that the Wall Street Journal has reported that the Thai government has lost confidence in Sinovac, a vaccine from China and the only one available in Thailand. All gatherings have been prohibited and a stay-in-place order is enforced. My required national Thai ID has been delayed for months so I cannot yet work, open a bank account, obtain medical care or a vaccine, or even board a train. Father John and I help each other, and I am busier than ever.

Strangely — Divine Providence again — the Thai headquarters for Father John’s Order are in Nong Bua Lamphu Province, nine hours drive north near the very village I was taken from 36 years ago. We have traveled up there three times for Father John’s missionary work with Vietnamese refugees, seminarians and migrant workers. We stay at the house my mother began to build before her death in 2000. My Aunt and cousins are there and I have reunited with them. After 36 years, they are now my family again. I have two families now, at opposite ends of the Kingdom of Thailand that I now call home.

And Father G, the man who showed me the Path to God, is still with me every day. He has told me that if our prayers were answered, if I had not suffered those five months in ICE, if God had given in to our pleas for my deliverance, then all would now be different and none of what I have just described in this post would be my reality.

This, he says, is the work of Divine Providence and I am astonished by it. On the day I left Father G, I said to him, “Thank you for giving me a future.” I had no idea how promising it would be.

The odds against all of this coming together are mathematically astronomical. When I come face to face with God, I want to poke Him with my pencil and say, “Do Math! Do Math!”

+ + +

A Postscript to readers from Pornchai:

I want to express my very deep gratitude to all of those who have assisted me over these months of transition. Your gifts for food, shelter, and the expense of starting life over have moved me profoundly. Please accept my apology for being unable to write to each one of you personally. You know who you are, and so do I. I pray for you every day.

With love and gratitude, Pornchai Moontri

+ + +

Editor’s Note: Please share this post. The Wall Street Journal has been reporting about recent events in Thailand. A new variation of Covid is creating havoc for the country, its economy and especially the well-being of its people. If you wish to help our friends, please also visit our “Special Events” page.

And you may also like these important related posts:

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

After Mass at the OMI Center near Bangkok. (Pornchai Moontri and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, are third and fourth from the right. On the far right is Pornchai’s Thai teacher Mea Thim Chalathip.)

Fr Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy

Midway in our Consoling the Heart of Jesus retreat in prison, Fr Seraphim Michalenko, Director of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, fulfilled Hebrews 13:3.

Some strange and interesting things are happening behind These Stone Walls this summer, and it’s a task and a half to stay ahead of them and reflect a little so I can write of them. In too many ways to describe, we sometimes feel swept off our feet by the intricate threads of connection that are being woven, and sometimes revealed.

I wasn’t even going to have a post for this week. I spent the last ten days immersed in a major writing project that I just finished. I knew it would be a struggle to type a post on top of that. I also had no topic. Absolutely nothing whatsoever came to mind. So I decided to just let readers know that I need to skip a week on TSW. Yet here I am, and it’s being written on the fly as I struggle to type it and get it in the mail in time.

What brought on this frenzy to get something posted on this mid-summer day? Well, first of all I awoke this morning and looked at the calendar, and realized that the post date I decided to skip is also the Memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It commemorates the apparition of our Blessed Mother to Saint Simon Stock, founder of the Carmelite Order, in the year 1215. She promised a special blessing to those who would wear her scapular. According to the explanation of this Memorial in the Daily Roman Missal, “Countless Christians have taken advantage of Our Lady’s protection.”

“Protection.” It seems a strange word to describe what we might expect from devotion to Mary. Most TSW readers remember my post, “Behold Your Mother! 33 Days to Morning Glory” about the Marian Consecration which Pornchai Maximilian and I entered into on the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013. Felix Carroll also wrote of it — with a nice photo of us — in “Mary is at Work Here” in Marian Helper magazine. [Flash Version and PDF Version]

Throughout that 33 Days retreat leading up to our Consecration, I was plagued with the creepy feeling that this was all going to cost us something, that maybe Pornchai and I were opening ourselves to further suffering and trials by Consecrating to Mary the ordeals we are now living. What we have both found since our Marian Consecration, however, has been a sort of protection, a subtle grace that seems to be weaving itself in and around us, permeating our lives. Exactly what has been its cost? It has cost us something neither of us ever imagined we could ever afford to pay. The price tag for such grace is trust, and where we live, that is a precious commodity not so easily invested, but very easily taken from us.

I am amazed at the number of TSW readers who have written to me about their decisions to commence the 33 Days retreat, and commit themselves to Marian Consecration. I received a letter this week from Mary Fran, a reader and frequent correspondent who is completing her 33 Days retreat with her Marian Consecration on the day this is posted, the Memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. She is going into this with just the right frame of mind and spirit. I hope she doesn’t mind, but here’s an excerpt of her letter:

“This is a very good retreat. I will be sorry to see it over. I have the Consecration Prayer typed out on pretty paper in preparation for the big day. A new beginning. A new way of life. Under new management.”

The truth is, Mary Fran, that it will never be over. But I like your idea of a life “under new management.” The concept seems to have a lot less to do with what Marian Consecration might cost in terms of trials to be offered, and more to do with what graces might be gained to endure them when they come. I’m not sure of why or exactly when it started, but after receiving the Eucharist since my own Consecration I have begun to pray the Memorare, a prayer attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux that best expresses our confidence in Mary as repository of grace and, therefore, protection:

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto you, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To you I come, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen.”

Trust Is the Currency of Grace

In a post last month, “Father’s Day in Prison Consoling the Heart of Jesus,” I wrote a little about how much of a daily ordeal our prisons can sometimes be. Near the end of that post, I quoted a brief dialogue between Father Michael Gaitley, author of Consoling the Heart of Jesus, and Father Seraphim Michalenko, Director of The National Shrine of The Divine Mercy. Their discussion is worth expanding a bit for this post. In fact, it was part of this week’s assigned reading in our Consoling the Heart of Jesus retreat in which we are at the midway point behind these prison walls. So here is a little more of that conversation:

“Father Gaitley: ‘And we want to console Jesus in the best possible way … and the best way to console Him is to remove the thorn that hurts His heart the most, the thorn that is lack of trust in His merciful love … and the best way to remove that thorn and console Him is to trust Him.’

”Father Seraphim: ‘And how do you LIVE trust? What is its concrete expression in your daily 1iving? … The way you live that trust is by praise and thanksgiving, to praise and thank God in all things. That’s what the Lord said to St. Faustina.’”

— Consoling the Heart of Jesus, p. 95

It struck me just today that the new trial asked of me in Marian Consecration is to imitate her trust, her famous fiat to the seemingly impossible: “Be it done to me according to Thy word.” Such trust is not an easy thing to embrace when the world turns dark, when freedom is taken by forces beyond our control, when fortune fades, when health fails, when loved ones are lost, when love itself is lost, when evil seems to win all around us, when depression, the noon-day devil, wants to rule both day and night.

That almost seems to sum up prison, and as such we are all destined for the trials of life in some form or another. We are all destined for some form of prison. So many readers have asked me for an update on our friend, Anthony, of whom I wrote recently in “Pentecost, Priesthood, and Death in the Afternoon.” Anthony is in prison dying of cancer. Several weeks ago, he could no longer bear the pain he was in so he was moved to the prison medical unit for palliative care. He came to the prison chapel for Mass the following Sunday, and the one after that. He was not there at Mass last week, and it is very possible we will not see Anthony again in this life.

Though he is but 200 yards away locked in another building, prisons pay no heed to the bonds of connection between human beings in captivity. Once Anthony was moved elsewhere, we may not visit him, inquire about him, or even hear from him. That is one of the great crosses of prison, and the welfare of that person and his soul is something about which we can now only trust. We can only be consoled by what YOU have done in our stead. When I last saw Anthony, he smiled and said, “I have gotten so much mail and so many cards I feel totally surrounded by God’s love.”

Father Michael Gaitley summed up nicely the road out of this dense forest of all our anxious cares:

“So the best way to console Jesus’ Heart is to give him our trust, and according to the expert [Fr Seraphim Michalenko] the best way to live trust is with an attitude of praise and thanksgiving, the way of joyful, trustful acceptance of God’s will.”

— Consoling the Heart of Jesus, p. 96

Opening Impenetrable Doors

At the end of “Dostoevsky in Prison and the Perils of Odysseus,” I wrote, “the hand of God is somewhere in all this, visible only in the back of the tapestry where we cannot yet see. He is working among the threads, weaving together the story of us.” Some readers liked that imagery, but it’s also true. It really happens and is really happening in our lives right now. I have experienced it, and Pornchai has recently experienced it in a very big way, but only with eyes opened by trust. Here’s how.

In the months after Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I first met, United States Immigration Judge Leonard Shapiro had just ruled that Pornchai must be deported from the U.S. to Thailand upon whatever point he is to be released from prison. The very thought of this was dismal, like stepping off a cliff in dense fog with no safe landing in sight. Pornchai had only a “Plan B”: to make certain that he never leaves prison.

I was deeply concerned for him, and tried to put myself in his shoes. How does a person get literally dumped into a country only vaguely familiar with no human connections whatsoever? How would he live? How could he even survive? So I told him something so totally foreign to both of us that I shuddered and doubted even as I was saying the words. I told him he has to abandon his “Plan B” and trust. Trust me and trust God. What was I saying?! I wasn’t even sure I trusted at all.

Three years later, Pornchai became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday 2010. A lot of people don’t realize that this was completely by “accident.” And it caused me to worry even more about his future. Thailand is a Buddhist nation. Less than one percent of its people are Catholic. I wondered how becoming Catholic could possibly serve him in a country and culture from which he was already completely alienated and in which he must somehow survive.

Pornchai didn’t even know that the time he was choosing for his entry into the Church was Divine Mercy Sunday. What he had originally planned was to surprise me by telling me of his decision to be Baptized on my birthday, April 9, which was a Friday in 2010. It was, in his mind, to be a birthday present. Some present! I wasn’t even trusting that this was a good idea.

So Pornchai went to talk with the prison’s Catholic chaplain, Deacon Jim Daly to help arrange this. The Chaplain asked a local priest to come to the prison for the Baptism, but he was only available to do this on Saturday, April 10. I stood in as proxy for Pornchai’s Godparents, one in Belgium and one in Indianapolis, while Vincentian Father Anthony Kuzia Baptized and Confirmed Pornchai.

The next day was Divine Mercy Sunday, and it just so happened that Bishop John McCormack was coming to the prison for his annual Mass that day. So just the night before, I explained to Pornchai about Saint Faustina, Divine Mercy, why Pope John Paul II designated the Sunday after Easter to be Divine Mercy Sunday, and how this devotion seemed to sweep the whole world. Pornchai thus received his First Eucharist and was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, and Whoever planned this, it wasn’t us!

Then because I mentioned that fact on TSW a few times, it got the attention of Felix Carroll, a writer for Marian Helper magazine. Felix then asked if he could write of Pornchai’s Divine Mercy connection for the Marian.org website in an article entitled, “Mercy – Inside Those Stone Walls.”  The response to that article was amazing. From all over the world, people commented on it and circulated it. Felix wrote that “the story of Pornchai lit up our website like no other!”

So then in the eleventh hour, Felix Carroll pulled a book he was just about to publish. It was supposed to be about 16 Divine Mercy conversions, but Felix changed the titled to Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions, and added an expanded chapter about Pornchai Moontri’s life and conversion. The chapter even mentions me and These Stone Walls, though I really had very little to do with Pornchai’s conversion. Pornchai and I received copies of the book, looked at each other, and simultaneously asked, “How did this happen?”

The Needlepoint of God

The book went everywhere, including into the hands of Father Seraphim Michalenko, Director of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy and the person I quoted on the issue of trust in this post. Father Seraphim became an instrument for the threads God was weaving for Pornchai. He sent the book to another contact, Yela Smit, a co-director of the Divine Mercy Apostolate in Bangkok, Thailand. The result was simply astonishing, and the threads of connection just keep being woven together. I wrote of this incredible account in “Knock and the Door Will Open: Divine Mercy in Bangkok Thailand.”

In that post, I wrote of how I undertook responsibility for easing Pornchai’s burden by trying to find him connections in Thailand only to be frustrated every step of the way. Then, in spite of myself, in the back of the tapestry where we cannot yet see, those threads were being woven together miraculously, and trust found a foundation in the dawn of hope. Suddenly, through nothing either of us did or didn’t do, the cross of fear and dread about how Pornchai would survive alone in Thailand was lifted from him.

Pornchai and I went to Sunday Mass in the Prison Chapel last week. The priest who is usually here is away for a few weeks so we heard it would be someone “filling in.” It was Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, 84 years old and the man who opened the doors of Divine Mercy for Pornchai in Thailand where God has accomplished some amazing needlework. Father Seraphim was accompanied by Eric Mahl who also has a chapter in Felix Carroll’s Loved, Lost, Found, and who has become a good friend to me and Pornchai. They both returned that evening for a session of our Consoling the Heart of Jesus Retreat. Pornchai was able to meet with Father Seraphim for a long talk. He has seen firsthand the evidence of Divine Mercy, and it all happened behind the walls of an impenetrable prison.