With that simple instruction, Joseph H Maeir, a Catholic priest from the United States, found himself in Thailand, ending up in the slums of Bangkok in the 1970s.

Fifty years later, he has nursed HIV patients, saved children from the streets and provided an education to the very poorest, and is now a slum celebrity with a slew of accolades in Thailand.

Yet the octogenarian credits all his accomplishments to others. “I’ve never had an idea on my own,” he says.

Maeir, who goes by the moniker Father Joe, says the church moved him to Thailand in 1967 because they considered him a nuisance who drunk and talked too much. After a stint in Laos cut short by the civil war, he returned to serve the minority Catholic population in Bangkok in 1972.

But rather than opt to live in the areas popular with the expats of the time, the new parish priest settled in a slaughterhouse in the district of Khlong Toei. At that time Catholics dominated the city’s pork production, he says.

“They lived in the slaughterhouse and they needed a priest … no decent priest wanted to deal with [them] but I said I’m a smelly old foreigner, low class, dirt farmer-poor Irish so I will be the priest.”

Half a century later, he’s a neighbourhood staple and says the dogs no longer bark at him and the nights of rats “licking the salt from his hair” as he tries to sleep are long gone.